


The Face of an Honest Man

by orciny



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, Magical Realism, Post-Reichenbach, Reunion Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-05 20:02:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orciny/pseuds/orciny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had meant to do it in a way that was magnificent. Or if not magnificent, then at least controlled. Or if not controlled, at least kind.</p><p>Instead, Sherlock barely makes it back to London, where he's thrust into John's unwilling care. How do you fix a problem so big it may or may not have broken physics? What's an apology worth, when John is lifting off the skin of the world?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Drought and Migration

**Author's Note:**

> This story will be posted in full by the end of December, with updates most days between now and then. It's about 35,000 words.
> 
> Infinite thanks to mangledyarn, who will probably never run out of smart things to say.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which John moves three times, dreams once, and does an awful lot of tidying up.

 

After the funeral, John tucks Mrs. Hudson into a cab and leans down to kiss her on the cheek. He has been greeted all day as the widow, and he's eager to be gone from all of this. Her hands flutter across the small handbag in her lap and she exhales a quiet _oh_ at the man they’ve buried together. _Oh, Sherlock,_ but only _oh._

“I’ll call you in a day or two.”

“And you’ll come round again? Can’t live long on one pair of trousers.”

“I packed a bag before I left.”

“Alright, dear. I can pull your clothes together, if you like. Or a few suppers? Is Harry keeping you fed?”

“She’s keeping me fine. I’ll be alright.”

She looks worried. “You’ll call?”

“I’ll call.”

She nods and pats his sleeve, resting her hand there a moment, and then pulls the door shut. Before the cab pulls away, she rests the side of her forehead against the window and looks up at him. He touches the back of his knuckles to the glass beside her cheek and smiles sadly back.  
  


\---  
  


He spends three more days at Harry’s flat in Reading. She goes to work during the day and orbits him nervously in the evening, but they don't talk much. In the week he’s with her, she only makes it home for dinner once, and they eat in front of the television. On the days she works late, he doesn’t bother.

His body is heavy and nauseous, so sleeps a lot during this time. Mostly it is a blank, dreamless sleep, a continuation of his dull days in which he clenches down tight around his pain and just waits. He feels suspended in time.  
  


\---  
  


On the third night, he dreams he is walking up a hill. Not walking but trudging. He’s carrying his old army pack on his back, half personal and half medical supplies. It’s heavier than he remembers and his lungs are straining with the effort. His body feels wrong, and softer than it was when he carried this pack. He pauses and puts a hand to his chest, finding soft knit wool. He sees that he is wearing his civilian clothes. Under the jumper, his belly rounds gently outwards. He is also wearing his civilian body.

Ahead of him about twenty paces, Sherlock is not trudging. He is walking briskly, spilling talk and gesture with his long coat wagging elegantly behind him. John can hear the tones, the unmistakable cadence of Sherlock’s ranting - excited, disdainful, urgent - but he can’t hear his words. And from all his edges, the gloved hands he waves and the swish of his charcoal tails and the toss of his preposterous curls, falls the dark dust and ragged shale that John wades through. As Sherlock walks, he is building the hill, always at its summit, laying it down underneath his feet as he spews deductions and insults and earth crumbles off of him in waves.

John scrambles upwards, fighting for footing on the sliding rock Sherlock is tossing off. He loses his balance more than once, and his hands touch down on fragments of glass and then sink into cold sand. There is sand in here too, red and yellow and grey. Not just sand, but breadcrumbs. When he pauses to catch his breath and brace his sore thighs, he drifts backwards in the debris and Sherlock walks on. He is not sure whether he is supposed to follow, but Sherlock is still talking, so he tries. He tries and tries and tries.  
  


\---  
  


The next day he boots up his laptop for the first time since arriving at Harry’s and makes appointments to look at six bedsits in London. He hates them all, but agrees to take the last one: a square, affordable little space in Hammersmith with bare walls that suggest nothing. Harry drives him into the city on moving day, offering a few stiff pleasantries about the room and quickly leaving. They are both relieved. They don’t know how to be around each other any more.

That evening he is restless. He means to do a proper shopping, but winds up in a busy M&S with neither appetite nor interest. On the way home, he realizes that he forgot to check his new kitchenette for a kettle. This small oversight is overwhelmingly depressing. He rings Mrs. Hudson when he gets home.

“Oh, John. I thought you wouldn’t call and I didn’t know how to reach you.”

He swallows back a rising tide of shame. “Yes, sorry. I’ve been at Harry’s. Just left, actually. I’m in Hammersmith.”

“Hammersmith?” she repeats as if it’s further even than Reading. “That’s zone 2. And you’re staying?”

“For the time being, yeah. Until I know what’s next.”

“That’s good, dear, that’s right. You take your time.” He pictures her nodding.

She comes by the next day to deliver the rest of his clothes and a miscellany of odd items: a few books from his nightstand, bedding from the upstairs closet, a small box of dishes drawn at random from the kitchen of 221B, and the union jack cushion which she had guessed, wrongly, was his. Despite his offer to get lunch, she also brings several deep containers of food, leaving the kitchenette smelling of stroganoff. They sit together at his tiny breakfast table, eating companionably while she chatters about Mr. Chatterjee and Mrs. Turner and everything in the world except the empty two thirds of her home.  
  


\---  
  


In the end, he is in Hammersmith for three months.

For the first month, he barely unpacks.

In the second, he calls Sarah and returns to work - part-time only, until he’s a bit better sorted. After six weeks of idleness, it is a pleasure to be useful. Looking back, he has no idea how he passed the time when he wasn’t working.

By the third month, there is food in the fridge and there are crumbs on the counter and a few dirty dishes in the sink most of the time. He has limped back towards the ordinary pace of life. He also has money together for first and last’s on a proper flat.

Eventually he finds one that’s clean and reasonably bright, with grey walls and olive countertops and well-proportioned rooms. It’s sensible but uninspiring, and feels about right. He gives the building manager Mrs. Hudson’s phone number as a reference and is told the next day to move in whenever he likes.

He saves himself a full day to pack, but it barely takes him the morning. None of his breakables ever made it to the bedsit, and with the rest of the day looming ahead of him, he accept that it’s time to return to Baker Street to gather the rest of his things.  
  


\---  
  


He’s a bit queasy, hesitating on the threshold of 221, but he forces himself to knock. Mrs. Hudson brightens at the sight of him and he relaxes a bit as she coos, hugs him, and guides him into her kitchen.

It’s been months since he’s been in anyone else’s living space, and the warmth of it leaves him homesick. He tells himself the new flat will be better. To his surprise, he spies a mostly-empty wine bottle and a pack of menthols snuck behind the jars of fresh baking. He watches her with new interest.

She asks after Sarah and the surgery, and after Harry and his tiny bedsit. She has been worried. He looks at her and thinks, _of course she has_. He reciprocates with idle talk about her hip, the neighbours, the coming winter.

Eventually he comes round to it.

“It’s about time I left Hammersmith,” he begins carefully.

“Oh!”

He puts his hand on her arm. Guilt is pulling at him again. “No, no. I’ve found a flat. Over in Whitechapel. Moving in tomorrow.”

“Whitechapel?” she says, not quite containing her distaste. He will never understand the Holmes-Hudsonian disdain for the inner suburbs of London. “I’m sure it’s lovely, it just seems such a waste.”

“A waste?”

She sniffles a bit. “And the flat upstairs sitting empty.

He sighs. “Mrs. Hudson, I can’t. I just can’t. You know that better than anyone.”

And it’s true, he can see that she does, but she still looks at him sadly. “I know, dear. It’s just so quiet with the both of you… I almost wish I could put it out to rent again, though I suppose that would be just as bad in the end.”

“Why can’t you?”

“The terms of the estate settlement, I expect. I don’t blame you for not wanting to live there, but it’s not like anyone else can. Not that I’m not grateful - and to Mycroft Holmes, of all people.”

“What?”

“Yes,” she says slowly. “Did he not…? Oh, John, surely he told you.”

He shakes his head, no happier than usual to hear the name, and pictures the pile of unopened letters on his dresser.

“After Sherlock passed, he paid for the flat. I think he means for good - the rent is settled for the next ten years. Paid off my mortgage in one go,” she smiles a bit. John frowns. “It’s for you, John. He left it for you.” She puts a hand over his. “You’re meant to have a home.”

“I can’t,” he says so quietly it’s nearly a whisper. He absolutely won’t accept anything from Mycroft that feels like an apology.

“Well, you should. I don’t mind your moping, personally, God knows I understand it. But there’s no need for you to be sitting alone in some nasty little room for months on end. Absolutely none,” she is tearing up a bit. “There are people who love you yet, John Watson. Don’t be surprised when they try to take care of you. Truth is, you could use some caring for, and there’s no shame in that.”

She touches the back of her hand to the corners of her eyes and puts their mugs into the sink.

“Mrs. Hudson…”

“No, don’t bother.”

When she turns her face is patient.

“There’s not so much to go through upstairs. I packed the rest of your things. They’re waiting in boxes, have been for weeks now. Easy enough to do it all tomorrow, if you’d like.”

Doing all of this tomorrow sounds just right. He nods and stands to go. She lets him out without a word. In the hall, he is careful never to look over his shoulder, up the stairs and into another life.  
  


\---  
  


 He sleeps poorly that night, waking for a siren on the street, a limb gone numb beneath him, and an argument being had somewhere in the recesses of the building. In the morning he picks up the car and loads in his case and odd boxes from the bedsit. They take up so little space huddled together in the trunk that he thinks he’ll do the whole move in one trip. None of the major furniture in 221B was his, so there will only be small items for him there. He’s not sure, offhand, what he left behind.

He parks on Baker Street and knocks reluctantly on the door to 221. For the second time in as many days, he half-hopes that he won’t be let in.

From deep inside the building, Mrs. Hudson yells, “Come in, John.”

He tries the handle. Locked. He knocks again.

“Oh just come in, I’ve my hands full of washing!”

He huffs before touching the keyring in his pocket and remembering that he never handed back his key to this place. He lets himself in and heads straight up to the third floor, sensing that if he pauses now he won’t get started again.

The room has been stripped completely. A quarter centimetre of dust covers the bare bed, the desk, and the empty waste paper basket. The closed cupboards are surely empty. The room is uncanny, caught out of time, so he closes the door again without lingering. Without his things in it, it doesn’t look like much. He knows the downstairs will be a different story.

The door to the second floor gives easily, creaking on its hinges. In a still moment, his eyes touch the windows, open to the late September air, the curtains waving lightly in the breeze, and the untouched fireplace, and the bison skull, and the chaotic shelves, the piles of everything, the dead television, the impossible desk, and the two chairs still posed in conversation. They are what’s the same, a hand reaching through time to rest on his shoulder. Stepping into the flat, he sees what’s different.

The kitchen table is clear of the mess he’d been unable to clean up before he left. Sherlock’s instruments are there, on the counter - beakers, pipettes, the microscope, all of it, folded neatly into a corner, clean but together. At his feet, beside his old chair, his own belongings have been sifted out of the mess of the flat and neatly stacked, sealed in boxes or wrapped in newsprint. He scans the titles still on the half-emptied bookshelf; Mrs. Hudson has picked his out more or less accurately. He huffs a little, touched. He squats down and puts a hand down on the packages; the print is smudged with handling but the headlines on the newsprint are still legible - the crime section, from months back. He coughs out a laugh.

Mrs. Hudson arrives in the door behind him. He regards her over his shoulder, aware of how his face must look.

“Oh, John. I tried to gather your things.”

He stands.

“I didn’t want you sifting through everything by yourself, all his rubbish, to find what’s yours. The papers, you wouldn’t believe. And the nonsense that man left on my table, John, just the smell of it…”

She crosses to him and hugs him around the waist. He looks at the pile of equipment on the counter. He thinks about her, alone in the flat after he had gone, dumping grotesqueries out of the beakers, scrubbing the bottoms of the slim glass tubes where sediment would have formed. He thinks of the hands that have passed reverently over every surface of this flat, doing what needed to be done, hands that smoothed down blankets on their chairs and pulled all the right books off the shelves when she saw that he wouldn’t be back. Mostly, he thinks about her alone in her grief, facing her work, awake as she climbed her own mountain of shale.

He sighs, lowering his face and breathing deeply into her hair, and then he puts his arms around what’s left of the family he chose.  
  


\---  
  


Twenty minutes later, he has unloaded the contents of the car into 221B and cancelled his lease in Whitechapel. Mrs. Hudson is dropping the plaid blanket back onto his chair and tittering contentedly. He should have known by now that there are no clean breaks for John Watson.

That night, they order in a curry and eat together on the sofa. When it arrives, Mrs. Hudson yanks off the latex gloves she has been wearing while freshening up the washroom tile. Her hands are pearled, her fingertips slightly shrivelled, and dusted with sterile powder. John looks at her long, pale fingers, smelling of chemicals, sweat, and ash.

By the time she leaves, all the easy things have been put away: clothes sorted, bed dressed. He settles on the sofa, close to the window, and thinks to himself that there’s an awful lot that still needs doing. Despite the day’s efforts, the room is littered with the debris of their old life. Sherlock’s life, really. No, theirs, together. He knows without looking what the bulk of the papers are: unpublished monograph drafts, notes on ash samples, photocopies from medical journals, sheet music both classical and original, cold case files from the Met spilling their guts everywhere, lab results, unplaceable photographs, correspondence with experts in pollen from Berlin and asphalt erosion from Beijing and surveillance technology from Hyderabad. Sherlock’s correspondence could fill a hall of the British Library. He wonders if those men and women heard the news when he died. He wonders how many have newspaper clippings of him pinned to their pegboards the way he kept clippings of all of them.

The papers can’t stay. Neither can a lot of things.

He picks up the remains of the takeout and dumps the dirty plates into the sink. They can be washed tomorrow. It can all be taken care of tomorrow. The fridge is perfectly clean inside, obviously Mrs. Hudson’s doing. He remembers the chaos that built up here over the years: food and old cups of coffee (why, Sherlock, why? just throw it out and make more) and takeout containers and cartons of milk and three pieces of broccoli at different stages of decomposition (one with larvae - no, all with larvae?) and a tiny rind of cheese, an open bottle of white wine, a few beers, and something lost in the back for months, dripping burgundy goo onto the floor, and jars of oddities, limbs on plates and worse. Always, it was like that. He puts the old curry on the middle shelf, but it looks strange suspended there like a lonely astronaut. He nudges it to one side and almost disappears under the meat drawer. Better. He sighs, closing the fridge door and idly opening the freezer.

“Oh, Mrs. Hudson.”

The freezer is full. In tupperwares and sealed bags are fingers, a liver crusted over in frost, a piece of wormy mush now frozen solid, and a disgusting miscellany of unidentifiable slops and grossly coloured liquids: the remains of 221B’s biohazards, lovingly frozen for safekeeping. John laughs. And then he shudders out his first tears since the funeral, happy and sad and heaving cold air.

Of course he will have to toss it all eventually. But he does without a freezer for longer than he’d like to admit.  
  


\---  
  


Some of it ends up being easy; he sees quickly that there is nothing of his at all on the desk, and the whole of the towering paperwork there gets swept into boxes to be sorted when he’s better able. He puts the boxes in the downstairs bedroom and his laptop and morning paper on the empty desk.

Onto the gap-toothed bookshelves. He considers packing away Sherlock’s books, then decides against it. Sherlock’s collection of literary and encyclopedic oddities - full as it is of reference texts, cryptic scientific tomes, historical studies of dubious quality, an unexplained handful of sensation novels, and beautiful thick-skinned first editions - is impressive. In the end he sorts both their books by use, as before, undifferentiated by ownership. He leaves a slim row of shelves, about eye-height, for his DVD collection. They had been banished to his bedroom, before, and now he places them where they will be useful.

He’s unsure what to do with most of the furniture, but unless someone turns up to claim it, he will leave it where it lies. He realizes he’s never known what of it belonged to Sherlock and what was Mrs. Hudson’s, only that none of it was his. Maybe now all of it is, with one notable exception.

He has been avoiding the armchairs since he arrived. He’s not sure he has the right or desire to get rid of them, but they can’t stay there. He approaches his own, placing his hands on the crown and feeling superstitious: bad to be moving it, or even thinking of it as his. It had been there when he moved in - possibly Mrs. Hudson’s, before, as he can’t imagine it belonged to Sherlock. The black leather chair he must have properly owned. It looked like it was forged around him; classic but modern, luxurious from first to last, and more comfortable by far than it looks. It absolutely has to go.

John expects it to be light, but it is surprisingly heavy. He pulls it into the downstairs bedroom, settling it in among the tidy packages of Sherlock’s belongings, wrapped as John’s had been, stacked on top of the dressers and in corners on the floor. John is grateful; this room has always been immaculate, like the eye of Sherlock’s personal storm, like his mind palace, John had always assumed. Always, even at the worst of times, it was quiet here. Framed nicknacks still hang on the walls. Mrs. Hudson will tell him later that in the days after the funeral, Mycroft had said he would send someone to collect Sherlock’s things. No one ever came.

In the living room, his chair now looks impossibly lonely. But he loves it, so he tries to get accustomed to seeing it there on its own. For two days he dances around it, his hand alighting briefly on its back when he passes, but he does not sit in it. On the third day, he drags it into the downstairs bedroom to sit beside the other.

A space yawns in front of the fire. He fills it with nothing.  
  


\---  
  


A month later, his limp has returned. He does his physiotherapy exercises before the hearth with all the curtains closed.  
  


\---  
  


Three months later, his limp persists but his physio appointments end. He realizes that he has not been touched, except by doctors and Mrs. Hudson, in half a year.

For the next eight weeks, his fucks his way through all of London. It’s February when he begins. He beds women from coffee shops, street corners, the surgery. He beds women from pubs and the tube and the grocery. He’s pulled into public washrooms, the backs of cabs, gritty alleys with nowhere good to lean, storage closets, baffling flats full of pink and clean towels and framed photos of groups of women laughing. And occasionally, he leads someone up to 221B, their hands so often on him before they top the stairs, up under his jacket tugging his shirt out of his trousers. They never seem to make it up to his bedroom. He lays them out instead, moonlit and wanting, in the big empty space before the fire.

 

 

 


	2. The Undividing of Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sherlock misses a text, forgets how to sleep, and has a showdown in Brompton Oratory.

 

After the funeral, Sherlock leaves London immediately. The city is thick with Moriarty’s people and those who believe he is dead, all of whom are grieving and angry and all of whom, more or less equally, would ruin him for being alive. With notice that the last of the snipers has left the country, he and Mycroft stop bickering. The chess board begins to unfold before them and suddenly there is the work. 

Mycroft has disappeared people before, but this will be different. No MI6 training, no new identity pulled off a shelf pre-packaged. They debate over his back story, his appearance, their communication channels. Sherlock has disappeared before, too, but only from people who let him go willingly. 

A nervous optimism pervades. They agree that he should expect to be gone a matter of weeks.

When he leaves for the airport, he looks different, even to himself.  
  


\---  
  


19 months pass, made up of 590 different days.

They pass for John, too.  
  


\---  
  


It’s early in the new year, and Sherlock is holed up in a rental cabin in Meiringen when Mycroft misses a check-in. 

He wakes up lazily that morning, as he does when he has run out of leads and retreats here to recover. Drowsiness keeps him momentarily sealed within his skin, and he luxuriates in the warmth of the bed. He is underwater, breathing deeply, awash in the quiet of his sleepy body. 

When his mind looms up out of the darkness and he accepts that he won’t fall back asleep, he leans out the bed and opens the window. The Swiss winter has piled up against the glass and freezing air now tumbles into the room. He retreats back under the blankets but swipes his cigarettes and phone from the nightstand. He snakes his fingers along the elastic waistband of his pyjamas, finding the vertical seam twisted around behind his back. His fingers plunder the tiny gap where he picked the stitches out a year ago, and he coaxes his SIM card out from between the elastic and flannel. He slides it into his mobile and lights a cigarette while he waits for the OS to load. He had too many phones stolen, back in the early days, and now his SIM card lives on his body until it is needed. Only once has he been stripped in an attempt to find it. 

These months have been an exhausting mix of action and waiting. With Mycroft’s help, he has assembled a complete map of Moriarty’s web, which hangs wide across a whole wall of Sherlock’s mind palace. Gradually, over the last year and a half, dark areas (here be monsters) have been populated with faces and then, most pleasingly, covered in small grey X’s. With enough surveillance and footwork, and with long weeks of solitary travel and light, watchful sleep, progress has been made. Only four remain: two of the original snipers, from the business in London when this all began, an information broker, and one, One, sitting untouchable at the top of the map, who has never set foot outside the city since. He will have to be last. Of course, he was always going to be last.

Meiringen he saves for times when there is nothing to be done but stay dead. He has depended on these rare periods to sleep, to recharge, to reorganize the oceans of data collected during his time away, and to plunder new memories for clues overlooked while he was travelling alone on highest alert for danger. 

Mycroft always checks in on Sundays, even when there’s no new information. This time, Sherlock’s phone chirps to life and shows him zero messages received. He rechecks the time - yes, the text should have come hours ago - and tries to ignore the dread already settling into his stomach. He inspects the phone, inspects the SIM card, but nothing appears to have been tampered with. He texts their emergency contact number and pushes the duvet down to his waist. The cold air raises bumps on his skin, but he is on fire. After an unprecedented sixty seconds, Mycroft has not texted back and he is afraid. Something is very wrong. 

He opens the folder of photos stored on his SD card. The folder is empty. The entire card is empty - his notes, his saved addresses, his contacts, all gone.  He yanks it out of the phone and pores over it. Sure enough, the tiny X he had etched into its cover is missing. This is not his card. This is very, very wrong; he sorts backwards through the last few days, desperately seeking any moment his phone was vulnerable to tampering. This is no simple mix-up, no case of grabbing a stranger’s mobile rather than his own; his X is there on the inside of the battery cover, marking it unmistakably his. He curses in frustration and hurls it out the window.

Where is his card, then? He tears through his clothes, seeking out all the hidden places where it sometimes travels and swallowing down images of hands in his luggage, tracking devices in his clothes, or flags on his fake passport. Whatever happened happened between his flight back from Gdansk and this morning. Local. ( _Shit_.) Somebody knows where he is.

 _Not now_ , he thinks,  _not this close to the end_. 

His card is nowhere. Not nowhere, far worse than that: it’s in the pocket of someone who will be watching. The searching turns into packing. He has to leave, now. He has to alert Mycroft, if possible, before whoever did this climbs up the beanstalk of their coded communications and sees what a very good swing they have at the giant. He can only hope that Mycroft has gone silent because he already knows, somehow. He packs his clothes and nothing else; he won’t be back for the rest of it. 

On the way out, he takes one bite from the end of a beefy sandwich left out on the counter. After a half-second, there is a mutiny in his mouth; something has gone off. _Surely not_ , his mind protests, _you only bought it this morning._ Wasn’t it? He checks his phone again - Monday. It is Monday. He has lost a whole day to sleep, and whatever is wrong has already been wrong for at least 24 hours.

He hauls his tiny case out the door and shuts it hard behind him, with a bad taste still humming on his tongue.  
  


\---  
  


The next four days pass in a blur of hyper-diligence. On the train out of Meiringen, with no leads, no mobile, and no line to Mycroft, he drops into his roaring mental seas, dead to the world but lacking a safer moment, and washes up with a name on his lips. That name takes him to Reykjavik, where despite the mess, what he will remember most is the heat blasting in the cab from the airport, and sweating in his parka, and how clean and cold the ocean looked beside the highway, and the salty smell of dried fish. 

18 hours after landing in Iceland, he boards a flight that keeps him suspended between day and night for hours. He has no idea of the time, only that he meant to sleep but his circadian rhythms told him no, yes, no, and so instead he stares straight into the semicircle of the setting sun, a blot of white-indigo-red floating over its core, spotting minutely in strange colours. He thinks about distortions of light, about the parts of the spectrum he can’t see, the spectrum of data lost between his pupils and his brain. In the dead time, he slips into his mind palace and replaces two more faces on the wall with a grey Xs. He has caught a break; one was the information broker. He rereads all the notecards pinned there and writes a new one in cobalt ink, an address in New York City that he found on a man who is dead now. He replays his recent memories, spots currency in a wallet which he mistook for Euros, and understands that after New York, the next stop is Jakarta. He wishes for Mycroft, who is so useful for sorting international business. He sent a scrambled email from a Swiss cybercafe the day he left Meiringen. He wonders if his brother was still alive to receive it. He surfaces to an aching back and the exact same sun he saw when he went under.

When he lands in Jakarta, he can’t fathom why the airport is even open. It’s the day after New York, the same day as New York, and he hasn’t slept, and flood waters obscure the ground under his feet. His cab gives up a few minutes in and he continues on foot, trudging (against the flow, he is sure), twisting his arms gracelessly about his chest as he struggles along what might be pavement and might be street. On both sides, the trees have been bowed by the rain and their long leaves meet the long grasses and tangle on the surface of the water. The air crowds him, as thick and scratchy as a wet wool blanket. His slim jeans swirl and cling against his calves, suggesting fish or debris or other submerged nightmares. Under them, a bandage on the side of his knee comes loose and seawater rushes into the wound with a sting that brings tears to his eyes. He curses under his breath; his mind unhelpfully supplies a quick slideshow of parasite biology, the long list of shots he declined in London, the viral body of dengue fever, the symptoms of Japanese encephalitis. Somehow they had known he was coming in New York; surveillance, only answer, but he doesn’t understand how. He has only used anonymous cafes and payphones - and Mycroft still not answering, or not there, not anywhere. He doesn’t know, needs an expert. He settles on someone remote, someone who knows him only by correspondence, and before morning he retires the second of the snipers and leaves for Hyderabad.  
  


\---  
  


Dr. Prakash’s office is bright and clean. It’s not a lab, but nearly; the best of the global tech industry, achieving a sterile meanness that the highest corners of the British financial sector have been pursuing, with their faux-Japanese minimalism and all their artless steel, for a ham-fisted quarter century: empty hymns to less in the city’s great temples of more.

“You’re alive,” she says, and he finds he pities her. “I saw your photo in the papers last year. You look different.”

He does not run a hand self-consciously over the shaved sides of his head. He hadn’t expected his hair to come out so red on lightening, but there you are. 

“So you’re… oh,” a flicker of smile, all nerves, clasping a pen with both hands. For a moment, she reminds him of Molly. He is well practiced at ignoring his homesickness. “I thought maybe I’d missed the news about you not being dead after all.”

“No.”

Rarely is anyone happy to see him, but she looks truly miserable. She understands that he has brought trouble with him.

“I suppose you need my help with something.”

“Someone is watching me.”

“I’d say so.”

“No, not in person. Impossible, too many precautions over too many continents. My phone was tampered with.”

“Ah. Give it here.”

 _Stupid, stupid._ He pictures it several feet deep in a Swiss snowbank. “Not possible. I disposed of it - too great a risk to keep it around.”

“And what would you tell a client who had tossed the evidence?”

“You don’t need the phone. I can tell you its specifications and my practices and how and when it was used. I need you to tell me what’s possible. Ideally, what’s likely.

“I don’t think I can help.”

“You can.”

Forty minutes later, she has proven more correct than he hoped. Something is off; she regards him with sympathy and resentment, predictably enough, but the snappish expertise of her emails is utterly missing. 

Finally she says, “I have something you should see, wait here,” and she leaves. He feels a twinge of paranoid exhaustion and considers fleeing. He can’t afford not to see what she wants to show him, but he decides not to linger more than two minutes after she returns. He scrubs at his hair and paces the room, wishing for a phone to check. Along the wall, a clean aluminium shelf rides at hip height, and his hand glides over it in passing as his eyes focus elsewhere. The cold of it shocks him: the sense memory belongs to another place. It’s the cold of the morgue tables in the basement of St. Bart’s. Why is this office full of morgue metal? 

Somewhere deep in the building, there is a clanging of machines or equipment, and closer by, very faint, across the hall and one room over, the sound of heavy industrial drawers being opened and closed, steel dragging on steel. He pictures cold squares on perpendicular rails, the curve of a handle. Rooms full of geometry, emptied of the living. He closes his eyes and listens to the dull, uneven clack of a woman’s low heels on tile (strange, solitary women in these kinds of places). A sadness in the step. His head feels over-crowded. His head is afloat on a murky tide.

There’s a tentative touch on his arm, with a slight brush of the fingernail on the withdrawal; it’s not Molly’s touch, with her short blunt nails bitten to the quick. He opens his eyes and Dr. Prakash is there, in her office, saying his name gently as if pulling at a sleepwalker. Ridiculous, he hasn’t slept since Meiringen.

She puts a folder into his hands and takes a step back. She looks about to run. 

Inside the folder, a small stack of photographs are paper-clipped together. On the top is a clear black and white photo of John stepping out the front doors of Baker Street. Sherlock doesn’t need the date stamp to know that it is recent. He hasn’t seen his home in months, and he has memorized the image almost before he has processed what it is. Underneath: John in their living room, unaware that he is being watched through the window. Under that, John with Sarah on a bench outside their clinic. Under that, John entering a tube station. Under that: the sound of breaking glass. A man, on the pavement outside Baker Street, military-weathered ( _home for two years, eight tours of duty, the last at a significant rank, an unease with his service but not like John’s_ ), in his middle age, at home in a stiff leather jacket ( _not PTSD, no official dishonour, but no desire not to die_ ) and work boots ( _a killer before? A killer before_ ) with his left hand loose and his right hand knotted ( _no meaningful adult relationships, travels light and often but not recently_ ) around black metal barely visible ( _military family, stationary now_ ) barrel of a ( _nausea_ ) eyes right down the lens of the _(old facial scar, bad stitching on the)_ smell of meat ( _crisp wrapper trapped in fence, three days old_ ) one red car two black one blue - _Moran_ \- Moran _\- Moran_ \- John - 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Her voice is one of many he is hearing. The rest are his own: one screaming about her complicity, one spitting threats at the man in the photograph, one calling pathetically for help, and three making plans.

“He knew you were coming,” she pleads. “I don’t know how. I swear I don’t know. I’m so sorry. They threatened my children.”

He unhears the last. There is no room for new people to worry about. 

“He gave me those. The last one, there’s something on the back.”

There, a jagged man’s script ( _steady, right-handed, tense_ ) awaits him in blue ink: 

**Come at once. SM.**  
  


\---  
  


Five days after Meiringen, he mounts the steps to Brompton Oratory, counting his paces to keep calm. The Oratory should be closed right now, but the front door will be unlocked. He’s not been here since he was young, and then only for a choral performance at Christmas, but he remembers enough to know that it’s a tough layout for snipers, guards, or backup; lots of dark space in the enclaves, but no other entrances except through the chapel in the back - likely to have second-level balcony judging from architectural style, a clumsy mix of Renaissance and Roman Baroque. Must not get drawn into the chapel. Unsure whether Moran will have come alone. Must not be coaxed out of main hall or trapped between pews. Hasty escape difficult in all cases. Why here, he wonders, and is flooded by things he forgot he ever knew: the cathedral's faded relevance, the rise of Westminster, some awful architect with an awful name, Portland stone and Devon marble, notable art including Maxxuoli’s apostles, some Rues, and a second round of art added in early twentieth century, so what? (His mother’s company on a Sunday afternoon, artists from London and a classicist from Cambridge, taking tea in the garden; he kept out of sight, eavesdropping; she never said she was ashamed; an argument about baroque religious art in the 1930’s, he struggled to follow; why god now, one said - he thought, why god ever?)

He shakes his head clear as he breaches the front doors and listens for movement. He needs his focus. But the question nags at him: why here? 

And who’s choice was it? Moran has shown tactical savvy - no mystery there, with the military background and a long-held seat at the right hand of the spider - but none of his employer’s comprehensive genius. Was this left to him, as instructions? Did the dead man who changed everything plan even for this? Is he still playing the game, even now? Inside the doors, he inhales the smell of incense, the air thick and close, and shoos away all that it evokes from other times: his neighbour’s room in their uni dormitory; his first dealer’s flat; Sebastian’s car, for his first few years as a traitor; trader, rather; and a misconceived family vacation in Goa, which he spent catatonic in the wet heat. 

There is silence from the hall; whoever is inside is standing perfectly still, meaning already in place for whatever is planned, however much plan there is. Is there a plan? Do either of them have one? He touches the metal of a (borrowed) (stolen) (will return if possible) (unlikely) gun against the small of his back, tucked into his waistband like John used to do, John with his quick hands and good judgment, a killer with no kill hand. (He looks down; he has been wearing a wedding ring on his.) He eases himself around the welcoming vestibule and strafes left, sinking into the dark walls of the first enclave. His parka rustles and he curses. Damn the winter, he needs his wool back. 

He peeks around the corner. The enclaves on the opposite wall appear empty but he holds for a moment, watching for movement. Occupants, if any, are holding incredibly still. Likely there are none.

At the high altar, Moran is standing with his back turned. He is pretending to stare at the oversized painting at the back of the sanctuary, but Sherlock knows he is waiting, listening just as Sherlock is, and seeing nothing. From this distance, he can’t tell how he is armed. He could have ambushed Sherlock on his way in the door if he had just wanted a showdown, but this is something different. This is a reckoning, or a standoff, or the last phase of a plan Sherlock has desperately hoped does not exist; the colonel has something to say.

Best out with it, then. He rakes a hand through his hair, missing his old dark curls and his good suit, though perhaps it’s best in this case to appear as he is: changed. He is so tired and so ready to be home. He smoothes down the black pullover under his jacket and abandons his olive circle scarf on the floor of the enclave. Slush bites at the skin above his ankles. His black high-top sneakers squeak on the cold floors.  He won’t miss any of this.

He takes a breath. His head spins with warnings and details and the memory of two handshakes, one first one last, in front of Baker Street and on the roof of St. Bart’s. He steps out from the enclave and into sight. His shoes squeak on the marble, it can't be helped. He reaches the central aisle, turns and clasps his hands behind his back. Moran has not moved, but in the thick silence Sherlock can hear his breath and his teeth grinding and all of his internal organs squeezing and filtering, and he can smell his red heart and the texture of the fine white-blonde hair on the back of his head. He can taste the metal in Moran’s blood as he gathers himself up to full height and approaches the altar.

Moran turns at last to meet him.

 

 

 


	3. Feng Shui for the English Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lestrade drinks a very cold coffee and John redecorates.

“Well. I’d say that bloke’s been in the river.”

The gloved tech crouching beside the body looks up, squinting against the flat early morning light. “Alright, Collins. Yeah, he washed up some time overnight. A jogger found him this morning, face down, hauled him out to check for a pulse - nothing. Called us after that.”

“Cause of death?”

“Drowning? Hypothermia? I just got here myself, but he’s pretty beaten up.”

“Is Underwood here yet?”

“Yeah, I think she’s gone upstream.”

“Thanks.”

Balancing two coffees in one hand, Collins treads off in search of his partner. He nods greetings to the small hash of officers who, like him, were junior enough to get called out on a long-dead body at five in the morning.

Up ahead, he hears Underwood shouting. He speed-walks towards her on bent knees, keeping the coffees level. His partner is leaning over something dark and unmoving on the shoreline. 

“Get an ambulance! Collins, get a hold of dispatch. We need a medic.”

“Ambulance, somebody! We’ve got a second body,” he yells behind him. A handful of the lingering officers pull out phones and he hustles on.

Underwood is speaking calm, steady reassurances to the wet pile of black on the beach. When Collins reachers her, they roll the body onto its back. As the face drags clear of the mud, they both freeze.

Underwood yells, “Blankets! We need dry blankets!” 

And she whispers, “Call Lestrade.”   
  


\---  
  


Lestrade wastes no time with incredulity. He is relieved, sure, and angry, but he has had longer than most to get used to this kind of rubbish - though never on this scale. By the time he gets off the phone with Collins, he just feels tired.

Underwood meets him in the A&E lobby. She nods and offers him a coffee. The cup is cold and the lid ajar, but he takes it.

“Sir.”

“Suzanne. Thanks for the call.”

“We thought you’d want to know before it gets round. The doctors were with him for a while, but he’s been moved to intensive care. Collins is there keeping an eye."

 “And you’re sure it’s him?”

“He’s pretty banged up, but yeah, reckon.”

“You’re sure?”

“We’re sure.”

It’s not visiting hours, but the badge gets them through. The room is tiny, barely larger than the bed and machines it contains. Lestrade puts his hands on his hips and shakes his head. Underwood picks up the medical chart at the end of the bed. She can’t read it.

“How?”

The junior officers exchange glances.

“We’re not sure,” Underwood answers quietly. “We found him on the beach at Lewisham this morning. He was in the river at some point, but he must have gotten himself out and then collapsed. We were called out for another body - a dead one - a hundred metres downstream. We don’t know.”

“He can’t have been there long,” Collins continues. “He’s got severe hypothermia, and that’s after someone beat him to shit. They won’t give me much in the way of details without a family member’s release, but look at him. There’s some bad business on his right side, too. Knife wound, they think, and probably fresh, so there’s a weapon out there somewhere.”

“Christ. Nothing on our John Doe, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Christ.”

They’re interrupted by a petite nurse at the door. She peeks her head in and surveys them. “Hi, sorry to interrupt. Just checking in - are any of you the family?”

The two younger officers shake their heads. Lestrade doesn’t, so the nurse beckons him into the hallway.

“No, I’m not family,” he flashes his badge. “DI Lestrade.”

“I’m sorry, Detective Inspector. Those two are yours, I guess?” she indicates Collins and Underwood.

“Yeah, they’re mine. Well, no - I’m mostly here as a friend.”

“I don’t suppose you know the family.”

He shifts his coffee between hands. “Bit, yeah.”

“Only we haven’t been able to reach them. We have two emergency contacts on file, but one number’s been disconnected and the other reassigned. Do you have a way to get in touch?”

“I don’t know. One of them, maybe.”

“Mr. Lestrade, your friend’s in a bad way. We might need the family, you understand. To make some decisions. And really quite soon.”  
  


\---  
  


 Lestrade gets in his car and shuts the door behind him, alone in the underground car park. He scrubs a hand over his face and thumbs through the contact list in his phone, scrolling for H. He blows through it and past, and then remembers that he deleted Mycroft’s number long ago.

“Shit.”

There’s nothing in the world he wants less than to make this call.

“Shit.”

He has two numbers for John Watson: one from way back when, and another from when he came back to town a year ago. More than a year? Must have been. They had exchanged a few texts back then, and not been in touch since.

He does not want to make this call.

This shouldn’t fall to John. For a moment, he wonders if Mycroft has a listed number. He thinks about calling the likely government agencies and asking for him. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel and tries to remember if they ever mentioned parents’ names, other siblings, where they grew up, anything.

He spends a few minutes googling combinations of “Mycroft Holmes,” “Sherlock Mycroft Holmes,” “Holmes contact,” “Sherlock Holmes update,” “Holmes reappearance,” before it degrades into “Sherlock Holmes magician,” “Mycroft Holmes spy ghost,” and “Holmes wanker.” He stops when the last yields an unsurprising amount of hits.

He does not want to make this call.

He procrastinates by flipping through the thick manilla file he grabbed before heading to the hospital. There was a lot to collect after Sherlock died - disappeared? - and this isn’t even all of it. It’s been barely a year since the first time he read it in full. So how? How? It should be somewhere in this file, whatever he did.

The autopsy report is close to the top. It’s thorough and conclusive. Impact injury, consistent with falling several storeys onto pavement. Dead on impact. (Then whose body was this?) (And what - )

Forensic pathologist, M. Hooper.

Jesus. _Jesus_.

He puts his car into reverse.  
  


\---  
  


He finds her in the morgue, in her lab coat and gloves, in no time at all.

She goes very pale as he approaches, and she looks up at him from under her bent head. She looks like she thinks he’s going to strike her, which of course he isn’t, so he slows himself.

“Look, I don’t - I don’t know what happened here, but questions later, yeah? Later. I need to get in touch with his brother.”

She looks uncertain.

“We found Sherlock unconscious in the Thames this morning. He’s at St. Joseph’s now but he’s in bad shape, Molly. The hospital needs his family. I need Mycroft.”

“I don’t know how to reach him.”

“Come on, they must have left you a number for emergencies. Something.”

“They didn’t,” she protests. “Mycroft looked in on me once, a few weeks after it happened, just to see if there was anything else that needed cleaning up. I didn’t even know he was involved until then.”

He puts on a skeptical face.

“I didn’t! Sherlock said he’d be in touch once he sorted out a way to keep contact, but I never heard,” she pauses. “I worried. But that’s just him, too, you’d never know if he died or just forgot about you.”

“Shit.”

“It’s strange, actually. Sherlock always complained about his brother watching him, didn’t he? And meddling with his cases. Something to do with the government, always turning up when he’s not wanted. So…”

“So why hasn’t he turned up at the hospital? Why isn’t he making calls to the Yard from some posh office, being a pain in my arse?”

“Why did he let Sherlock get hurt?”

_Shit_.

There’s a quiet moment while the implications hover between them. How the hell do you begin searching for a missing Mycroft Holmes?

“How is he? Sherlock, I mean.”

“Not good, but not dead either. You said it: with him, you never know.”

She smiles sadly.

“Alright, I’ll let you know if anything changes. And fair warning: you’re going to be wanted for questioning over this, and for whatever it’s worth, whatever the situation, I think you should co-operate. It’d be a good start to give me a call if anyone else turns up.”

She nods and he drops his business card on the counter beside her. He’s halfway out the door when she blurts out, “Has someone told John? Is he okay?”

“Haven’t yet, no. I guess that’s next.”

She tilts her head in thought. “You’re always having to deliver bad news. Aren’t you.”

As the door closes behind him, he hears her say, in her tiny mouse’s voice, _good luck_.

 

***

 

Two hours later, John is standing in a hospital.

John is standing in a hallway, before a door, looking through the glass window.

The door opens onto another hall, and across the hall is another door. That door has a tiny window, too. Through that door is a little room.

John is standing in a hallway looking through two windows at a man who is supposed to be dead.

In the little room, Lestrade is talking to a doctor. He stops when he sees John and the doctor looks up.

John turns on his heel and leaves.

 

***

 

Voices are first. Far away, murmuring, with beats like birds’ wings. For a while that’s all there is.

Feeling is next. Warmth on his face, and the outline of something hard sealed over his mouth and nose. There is a point of contact on his right index finger, pads on the tip’s top and bottom, holding gently. He flexes his finger, testing it, and there’s a pinch in his elbow, on the inside, and he withdraws.

A strange heat is blooming in his chest, but his stomach is still cold.

The starch of bad sheets grinds against his skin, and he settles.

He thinks he’ll rest a minute more.  
  


\---  
  


The next time he surfaces, his body has begun to ache. His body feels wrong.

His shoulders knot and unknot in great rolling cramps. He’s wearing clothes that don’t fit and aren’t made of the right fabric. The pinch and the pressure from earlier are still there, but the warmth on his face is gone and his fingers aren’t so cold.

There is no energy for movement. He feels liquid, feels crushed by water, feels a thousand years old. 

With great effort, he looks.

There’s on onslaught of white light, most of it from the right - window. He closes his eyes again. He hasn’t seen daylight in _plane infinite stillborn dusk alone unending alone_. A long time.

There is movement and noise - voices noticing, metal scraping on metal. Bodies coming and going, and a bright light visible through his eyelids. There’s a hand at his elbow, and more voices, and the pinch moves and needleprick good veins long time oh. He remembers -

Headlights probing through cheap horizontal blinds, voices through walls and on the other side of two closed doors, the young making their noise. Posh dorms, a pointless Friday, the last Friday before he leaves Oxbridge - 

Hands on him, other bodies moving, a collage of presence. He wants them gone. Other people, other times: his mother’s hands, on his shoulder adjusting his bed; metal curtain rings being tugged across rails, and she is drawing him a bath; a diplomatic soft-shoe across the back of the room, Mycroft, always watching. He isn’t sure. 

He vocalizes and the room goes silent until he is finished. Then it snaps back into action.

He tries to open his eyes. He opened his eyes. His eyes are closed, they are open. Behind everything, there is a tiny rectangle through which he can see into another world. Floating inside it is John’s face, looking absolutely wrecked.

Wait that’s not right that’s

 

***

 

John is standing in his living room, holding very still. He starts and stops dialing Mycroft’s number without noticing that he still remembers it. _Did you know_ , he wants to ask, but the answer is no mystery. _Idiot_ , he hears in someone else’s voice, and squeezes the phone in his hand, hard, until he hears a crack. He drops it to the ground, unthinking, and the back cover falls off. 

Through hiss of static in his head, he looks down at the phone, and it strikes him as obvious ( _obvious, John_ ) there in the middle of the living room floor, so clearly the neglected property of a damaged man. His lungs constrict. He scoops it up and surveys the room, with its strange open spaces, its patchwork furniture, its rearranged books, its bachelor’s mess. There are dirty dishes across the counter, there are photographs on the mantle, there is a new calendar hanging on the kitchen wall, the desk is clear. His left hand flexes and unflexes and his head is lifting off.

He holds the two pieces of his mobile and tries to think where to put them.

He winds up in the bathroom, dropping them into the empty pickle jar that Mr.s Hudson put in the toilet tank to save water. He replaces the lid on the jar and the lid on the tank, then he eases backwards out of the room and closes the door.

The buzzing in his ears magnifies the sound of the huge breaths he is taking. His mind is blank. _Air_ , he thinks, _air_. He crosses to the living room window and throws it open. The cold air outside is as thick and heavy as honey. He can feel it stealing sweat from his skin.

He leans on the desk, shivering a bit. His looks around this place he has spent the last year and a half, alone. Everywhere he sees corners tinged with remembrances and evasions and ways he’s moved on. The flat looks like a diorama of his grief, and worse, the ways he has tried to paper over it.

His planner is open on the desk, displaying is schedule for the week. Work shifts, a call to Harry, a rugby game with a team he wasn’t on when - 

He swipes the planner into a drawer and slams it shut.

Around the room are all of his things.

He has no idea if Sherlock will come here. He has no idea if Sherlock will live. There’s no - 

_Sherlock_

He lifts himself off the desk ( _fingerprints, John, a slight fade in the lacquer where you have been leaning on it with worry_ ) and tries to control his breathing. His mind is spinning an insane yarn. ( _Photo of us on the mantle, John really?)_ He crosses to the fireplace and flips the photo of him and Sherlock down onto its face. He looks at the other photos: his old unit, his parents’ house, his first medical office, other odds and ends. The flipped-down one stands out, now, it’s the only one you’d want to look at. He flips the others down. No, that’s ridiculous. He gathers them all into his arms and hustles up the stairs and dumps them into his tiny closet. Glass shatters. He doesn’t check which photo it was from and he doesn’t clean it up.

Back in the living room, he paces. He grabs the old plaid blanket off the couch and puts it over the desk chair. He gets a broom from the kitchen and sweeps some stray ashes back into the fireplace, suddenly wishing he’d never used the thing. When he’s done, the area in front of the hearth looks cleaner and emptier than it’s ever been. It might as well be whistling nonchalantly. ( _Stupid, obvious, recently used and then covered up, and why?)_ He curses and sprinkles some ash back onto the floor. It looks fake. ( _Dust is eloquent_.) He takes his pulse. His face burns but his body is shivering. The whole space is too empty.

No time to think, he thinks. Just take care of it.

There are a handful of books in John’s room. Some may be Sherlock’s, he isn’t sure. He retrieves them without checking the titles and stuffs them back onto the shelves wherever they fit. It’s not enough, it’s meaningless, there were more books than this. A year ago for spring cleaning he put the rest in Sherlock’s room.

The downstairs bedroom.

John opens the door and then closes it again, leaning on the doorknob through a wave of nausea. A wealth of their things - there will be no hiding this, this undead room. Storage, John thinks,I will say it is storage, not my business.

_(Transparent, dull, please.)_

He drags the plaid armchair out of the downstairs bedroom, where it cannot hide. He pulls it into the living room and sits down. He puts his head between his knees and breathes. The room is freezing. After a time, he shuts the window and tries to drag the chair up the stairs and into his own bedroom. It bumps painfully against his shins and he can’t quite fit it through the narrow door into the hallway. He can’t imagine how it was brought in - assembled in the flat, perhaps? His hands are going numb with cold, so he gives up and positions it back before the fireplace as if there had never been room for two. 

He retreats to his bedroom, closing the door behind him, and sits on the edge of his bed. His back is straight. He looks at nothing. He pushes air in and out of his nose and closes his eyes.  
  


\---  
  


An indeterminate amount of time later, there is a ghost of sound downstairs. A trilling, trapped ghost.

_Shit_.

He runs down and fishes his mobile out of the toilet tank. The back is still off.

“John?”

He finds his voice. “Yeah.”

“It’s Greg. I, uh… I think he’s waking up a bit.”

“Right.”

“They saw him move. Apparently he opened his eyes for a bit. They think he can hear, at least, though he’s still in and out.”

“Right. Good. That’s… that’s good.”

Silence.

John sighs. “On my way.”  
  


\---  
  


John stands in the hospital hallway, looking through the tiny window into Sherlock’s room. There’s no reason to go in. He can’t see much from here, and he is grateful for that - little more than the graceful arc of Sherlock’s collar, bloomed purple on one side where it peeks out from under layers of heavy blankets, and the edge of a profile he’d know anywhere. Of course he would - he has cleaned dirt and glass out of it, and stitched it back together, and watched it across a fire, and shouted curses at it, and all more than once, years and years ago. Not so many years. That profile has been the recipient of innumerable gestures of his care. There’s a doctor beside John talking to him like he’s the family, but he isn’t, so he tunes the man out.

A nurse is fiddling with Sherlock’s IV. Bretylium, he supposes, unless they’ve switched him to warmed saline or something for pain. He can see the report of the cardio machine. Sherlock’s heart is beating. His eyes are open, but he is staring straight ahead, and not responding to the woman’s meddling. He’s awake, but far from present.

_Of course his eyes are open_ , John thinks. 

The doctor is looking at John, apparently waiting for a response.

“Sorry, sorry. In my own head, there, a moment. In summary?”

The doctor regards him patient condescension, and John bristles. “Not to worry, it’s a difficult time. His body temperature is mostly under control, so unless we see evidence of lung trouble, I’d say he’s clear of the hypothermia. But we’re seeing some new issues arise. He’s quite banged up, as you can see, and he lost a lot of blood through the knife wound, but we’re still not sure whether that explains the slow response we’re getting.”

John gets stuck on certain words: hypothermia, blood, knife wound. “What do you mean?”

“We were expecting him to be a bit more lucid by now. His blood sugar is lower than any healthy man’s should be, and he still can’t seem to keep his eyes open most of the time. We want to run a brain scan as soon as possible, just to be safe.”

The doctor looks at him expectantly.

“Uh, right. Right, that sounds… sensible.”

The doctor nods in relief. “And of course we’ll keep him until he’s stabilized. If you need to bring him new clothes or arrange for visitors, you can speak with one of the nurses. So long as the scans are clean, I’d expect that you should be taking him home in no more than a day or two. ”

“Oh, no,” he looks back at the doctor. “No, that’s not me.”

The doctor makes a strange face, but he nods and leaves.

“That’s not me,” John says, again, to no one.

 

 

 


	4. The Places We Came From

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which no one is sure what to say.

Two days later, Sherlock’s eyes are still open and his heart is still beating. He is forgetful and easily disoriented, but there is nothing immediately wrong with him, so he is set to be discharged. The doctor says it is probably a side-effect of the hydromorphone, but he books Sherlock in to see a neurologist the following week.

John spends the morning trying to dig Mycroft Holmes out from under the city’s nails, to no avail. On his way out of the Diogenes Club he runs into Lestrade, who has apparently been doing the same. John evades conversation, but leaves the search in his hands. John thinks he understands the stakes.

When he arrives at St. Joseph’s, there is a crowd of press out the front, and behind them a squabbling mass of people with cameras and placards. Both accost him as he fights from the taxi to the hospital entrance. The sound of snapping cameras rises in a wave, from the professionals close to him and from hand-held cameras hoisted above the crowd by people in the back. He pushes away microphones and closes his ears to shouted questions. He feels the beginnings of a claustrophobic panic as the crowd closes in around him, so he puts his head down and plows forward as best he can. Somewhere on his right, a fight has broken out: a handful of eccentrics with “I believe in Sherlock Holmes” signs are yelling at a group carrying a banner demanding “Justice for Richard Brook.” It’s not his first encounter with either group, but it’s his first in a while.

Inside, there are armed constables guarding the doors. The staff all glare at him on his way up to the floor.

The chief physician explains to him that Sherlock needs to be released into someone’s care, and there are no good candidates for who that someone should be. John cannot protest; the hospital needs the room back and the crowds gone, and he knows as well as anyone the price a medical staff pays for running at diminished capacity. He agrees reluctantly to take him. 

The doctor suggests they leave through the exit in the kitchens, which opens onto a back alley and is less likely to be watched. John thanks him. A nurse will help them both down.

An hour later, Sherlock is struggling to get through the doors on his crutches. John is a few paces behind, unacknowledged, having been shaken off like another fussing orderly. He tried speaking to him, back in his room, but he’s yet to see a flash of recognition through those eyes like unreflective glass. 

John knows how a strong painkiller haze feels and how it looks. He’s unsettled by what he sees; no one knows why Sherlock is still wrong.

He reaches past Sherlock to push the door open. It’s a dull, wintergrey day, but Sherlock pauses and looks out at it. John can’t see his face. He still half-expects a sleek black car to roll up and receive them. He imagines helping Sherlock into the back seat, then closing the door and watching it drive away forever. 

The car doesn’t come. Sherlock reaches the curb and stops. They are surrounded by stinking bins full of old food and waste, but at least there are no gawkers with cameras. One of his nurses is smoking on the pavement a ways off. She eyes John with contempt: _help him_.

John clenches and unclenches his fist, and then he phones for a taxi.  
  


\---  
  


Getting Sherlock out of the cab takes time. His stitches clearly hurt when he bends at the waist and he doesn’t seem sure how to move his crutches. He pushes them out of the taxi before him. They clatter to the ground as he struggles to his feet, but he shouts when John reaches for them. John sighs and pays the cabbie. All around their door, there are roses, deerstalkers, and small paintings of Sherlock: trifles left by fans who stayed faithful and have now been rewarded. Fortunately, they have all come and gone.

He steps past Sherlock and keys the front door open. He curses at the sight of the stairs. He considers bringing Sherlock into Mrs. Hudson’s flat, but then remembers with horror that he has not yet told her that Sherlock is alive. _Shit_. He prays that she is out, or asleep, or somehow does not hear the clomping mess that is about to come through her hallway.

Sherlock stops, too, at the bottom of the stairs, and stares miserably upwards.

“Alright,” John sighs. “Let me.”

He takes Sherlock’s right crutch from under his arm and replaces it with his own shoulder, ignoring his sounds of protest. Sherlock squirms away but is overpowered by John’s firm hand on his side. They wobble together as they mount the first step, and Sherlock’s free arm grips John’s shoulder in reflex. They move slowly, pressed against the wall.

Sherlock is conspicuously silent through John’s grunts of effort. Halfway up, he is pretty sure the man has stopped trying to walk on his own power at all. He mumbles reprimand until he glances at Sherlock, whose face hangs inches from his, staring at him slack-jawed. His eyes hood a little when John meets his gaze. His grip on John’s shoulder tightens painfully and he mouths at words.

John looks away and presses on.

In the main of the flat, John deposits Sherlock on the couch and jogs back down for the crutch. Over his shoulder, he sees Mrs. Hudson’s door closing. He grimaces and approaches it, raising his hand to knock. He doesn’t want to deliver this news, though he refuses to feel as though he owes apologies. How could he? 

She opens the door again before he can knock. Her eyes are wet and she covers her mouth with a hand. 

“So it’s true?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” she closes her eyes and a tear rolls down her cheek. “John.”

He draws her into a hug. When she pulls away after a minute, she is smiling. 

“Our Sherlock, after all this time. He might have told us what he was up to, the brute. I’ll go and see him.”

“Wait. You might want to wait. He’s… not entirely himself, right now.”

“They said on the telly he’d been hurt.”

“Yeah. And they’ve given him some very strong painkillers, and I think they’re just… he’s not entirely there. Not just yet. Give it a day or so, maybe, and…”

She pushes past him and hurries up the stairs. He waits for a moment in the foyer, scrubbing a hand over his face. He considers leaving. There’s Harry’s, or a hotel. 

Upstairs, Sherlock is still slumped against the back of the couch. His hands are smoothing out the fabric on the sofa while his eyes roam over the room. When John enters, Sherlock snatches back his crutch and lays it across his lap. Whatever passed between them on the stairs is gone now. He doesn’t know where Sherlock is or how much he is actually seeing.

Mrs. Hudson is clucking and chattering to him, and from time to time Sherlock seems to hear her; his eyes follow her and his expression changes, and then he loses her again. John finds he cannot focus on her words. He slumps against the door, exhausted and out of sight. 

After a few minutes, Mrs. Hudson slaps Sherlock hard on the shoulder, kisses his forehead, and steers John into the stairway. 

“I see what you mean about the…”

“Yeah.”

“How strange, to see him sitting there on the sofa after all this time. Half the time it’s like he doesn’t see you at all. But he’s in there, our Sherlock. I may not be a doctor but I can tell you that much.”

She takes a long look at John.

“I’ll leave you two to get settled. I suppose there’s lots to talk about. You let me know if there’s anything I can do. I’ll pop in on you in the morning.” 

She kisses his cheek and disappears down the stairs. 

When he returns to the lounge, Sherlock is standing over the desk. He is rubbing a small section of the wood with his fingertips. 

“All right?” John asks.

“Mmmh.”

John flexes his hands. He can’t tell what Sherlock is looking at, but his face burns. He breathes deeply and walks calmly to the kitchen. He rests his hand on the table, then takes it back. He crosses to the dishes, not looking behind him. John listens. Sherlock is silent. John remembers to relax his shoulders. He rinses a few of the dishes under the tap and puts them in the drain rack. The rest he piles into the sink and leaves to soak.

When he turns, Sherlock is staring at him again and John stiffens before he can stop himself. There’s still a slight glaze to his expression, but John has no doubt at all that he’s being seen. He needs to speak. Someone needs to speak.

Idiotically, all he can think of is food. “There’s not much in. Toast?”

“No.” Sherlock’s voice creaks, dry from disuse. It’s the first thing he has said to John since his return, so John regards him openly for the first time. Sherlock looks younger, and older, and smaller than before. John never brought him clothes to change into, so the hospital laundered and returned the ones he was found in. They are like and unlike what he used to wear. The cut of the dark jeans is close to his old trousers, but the cowl-necked navy jumper drapes off him at loose angles. Most of all, it is the hair that is uncanny; with close-cropped sides and an unkempt ginger mess on top, his face looks longer, less defined, stranger around his careening eyes. He looks like a DJ from Berlin. 

John makes him toast anyway. When he lays it down on the coffee table, Sherlock’s attention locks on the clink of china against glass. He looks ravenous and nauseous and as though toast comes as an utter surprise.

John stands by, unheeded and uncertain, while he eats.

 

***

 

Sherlock dreams that night in riddles: 

Mountains to climb, stairs of marble stairs of clay, a mountain range of rented rooms, different stairs, he counts them always, always slow going up and fast going down: there were forty two steps to the room in Marseilles, fourteen to the one in Seattle, two to Meiringen, seventeen to the only one that’s worthy

Seventeen to

home so barely lived in and the books wrong there’ve been women here and so much space, an empty hearth.

 

***

 

He had meant to do it in a way that was magnificent. Or if not magnificent, then at least controlled. Or if not controlled, at least kind.

Instead, he wakes up like a drunk from a long nap, flexing his toes against his old sheets in his old bed with his head on his old pillows and dust in his nose. His body aches: his left abdomen, good god, but also his lungs, ribs, knees, head ( _pulsar_ , his mind insists, but it means pulsing), and nausea to top it all off. The room spins when he opens his eyes. 

He doesn’t remember how he got here. It’s silent in the flat, but the dust on his things is punctured by handprints that aren’t his. If he had just fallen asleep and laid here for two years, he would have woken up properly, covered by the same sediment and evidence of careful touch. (There is a creak in the kitchen floorboards and the sound of running water.) Then his body would not ache and he would know the best way to Return.

He emerges from his bedroom wrapped in a robe he liberated from dust-covered newsprint. It’s cold in the flat and he shivers inside it. His feet remember the mute places in the floorboards, learned a lifetime ago. Defence and good spying, the best of reasons. In the kitchen, John does not hear him approach. He is waiting for the kettle to boil, hands tight on the counter, then hanging stiffly at his sides. Sherlock has no idea what to say, at all, so he doesn’t. John’s shoulders are unchanged, they still creep up when he’s tense. Excellent, of course they do. His hair is still slowly greying, still cut by the Czech woman on Rossmore. He has had lovers, he has used the cane. He has lived alone. He calls his sister sometimes. He is still only half-time at the surgery. He wears that jumper too often and knows it. He’s been reading Sherlock’s books, some of them: botany and pulp history, Sherlock would say, if he were the type to guess. He’s got cold hands this winter, worse than past years. He is not thinking about anything. He is thinking about Sherlock. He is unhappy. Sherlock stares and stares. His fingers are remembering the feel of rough lambswool. Already he is smelling proper tea and it is wiping clean the wrong, empty smell of the flat that may or may not be his anymore. He is nauseous. He doesn’t know what to say, at all.

“I heard the door, Sherlock,” John says without turning around.

It’s his first time seeing John, really seeing him, but it’s not John’s first time seeing him; whatever reunion there was, he missed it. This is something far less certain. He sits down at the table, which has lately been used only for eating. His joints all throb at once and he presses two fingers against his bandages to keep his insides in. He tries to find a more comfortable sitting position while John pulls a second cup down from the shelves, John’s shelves, with barely concealed reluctance.

John sets a mug down in front of him and turns back to the counter. He picks it up, this meaningless piece of ceramic that once belonged to him, and holds it in his hands.

John had clearly intended to eat his toast over the sink, but now he can’t seem to settle anywhere. His back is still turned ( _parietal occipital atlas axis cervical scapula thoracic lumbar (detour for false ribs) sacrum coccyx_ )(He was running, for a few weeks before the new year, parks probably, until shin splints set in. Shame.). A vague memory of the day before: John so strangely unsure of where to put his body. Surely words were said. He doesn’t remember them.

His nausea churns when John fills his cup and he smells tea for real.

“Stomach?” John asks, turning back to the counter.

“Yes.” He sips the tea despite himself.

“And pain?”

He swallows with a grimace. “Yes.”

“You slept twelve hours. You’re overdue for some relief.” He grabs a pill container off the corner of the sink and continues, grimly and to himself, “Twelve hours. It’s a week for miracles.”

Sherlock averts his eyes as John drops two tablets on the table and turns away, filling the sink with dishes and running water. He coughs and it’s like being stabbed. _Stabbed - oh_. Oh, yes, a bowie knife. That particular memory explains rather a lot, though not how he ended up back in 221B, presumably in John’s care.

John eats his toast over the sink after all. Even behind his back, Sherlock looks at the tablets with the sense that he should not accept them. Irrational, superstitious - waiting for what, permission? ( _For John to want him to stop hurting, to be here, to move in and feel better and fold their lives together again._ ) Stupid.

He needs to venture something. Something before his mind wanders back into the haze it came from.

“You’ve returned to the clinic.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t you have work today?”

John rounds on him, calm cracking like a thin sheet of ice underfoot. “Sure, yeah, sure I do. Tell you what, just climb in the bin and we’ll keep you there until I get home. Take your mobile and ring me if you’re dying for real. I can be home in about forty minutes.”

Sherlock deflates, curled around his cooling mug. The bandages at his side feel damp. It will all end in time.

John sighs, disappointed in himself. 

The last two years have been a long, slow march of months, through which Sherlock has watched from a distance as John’s life closed up behind him. There were dispatches from his brother - _J leaving flat regularly, J back to work, J off the cane, J does not suspect_ \- and photos, occasionally, in weeks when he was injured or restless. It’s nothing new, the notion that their time together is limited, and Sherlock finds himself adrift on a sad old sea. Every man’s patience has its limits, and that’s without accounting for snipers, explosions, archenemies, or the desperation of petty criminals. He thinks about sea anemones and clownfish, ants pseudomyrmex and acacia trees, the great symbiotic pairings of the natural world. Not quite so with people. It had been a relief, when he first died, to find that he didn’t entirely mind being alone. He feels guilty about it now, but he had enjoyed the easy quickness of travel and thought, the lack of explanations and accommodations, the vast stretches of uninterrupted silence. The lack of supervision, really. But it was barely four months out that he saw he had had his fill of sleeplessness, and routine had settled in again at Baker Street, a routine without him at the centre, and he had begun having conversations with John in his head in which John would say things he knew weren’t right, were too even and unsurprising, too consistent and vacuous, or too much like the things Sherlock wanted him to say. He found the idea more difficult to accept, now. Perhaps not everything ends, he sometimes thought while he was dead, perhaps it need not. 

The problem, now, is that he cannot go - he needs help, he has nothing - and yet he isn’t entirely welcome to stay.

To _stay_. His vision goes slightly hazy, and he notices that he has absentmindedly taken the painkillers on the table. He touches the grimy bandages at his side and looks at his home. John looks torn between an apology and a left hook, trying to suppress both. Sherlock’s good, sturdy home. He laughs, and it’s delirious and uneven, lit with sparks of joy, the laugh of the shipwrecked when their feet touch land. He is so tired, and he is home, and they survived. John is whole and angry and standing right there. Right there.

John is walking away.

 

 


	5. Cypresses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which John makes soup and Sherlock plays the violin rather well.

 

It’s late afternoon, the day after Sherlock came out of his bedroom and saw John properly. There is a small mob assembled outside, day and night, so John has kept the curtains drawn. The crowd makes leaving the flat difficult, so Mrs. Hudson ran up a box full of food that morning, to tide them over: veg and bread and muffins. 

He is chopping tomatoes for supper and surreptitiously watching Sherlock dozing on the sofa. With a little luck, he thinks, he can be done with cooking and out of sight before Sherlock wakes up. It’s hard to know if his condition is improving; certainly it should be, but Sherlock doesn’t have typical habits to measure against. He sleeps odd hours and was awake and pacing most of the night, but that’s evidence of nothing. The bandages are ready to come off his side and he doesn’t seem to be in much pain anymore; it’s probably time to ease him off the codeine tablets and onto paracetamol. Maybe, John thinks, that will set his head to rights.

His mental state is very, very unclear. He comes and goes, seeing and then abruptly not seeing his surroundings. (John to Sherlock’s mind: always an uncrossable distance.) His reactions are strange, moody and unreadable even by Holmesian standards. This morning, during a particularly hazy hour, he followed John absently about the flat, stepping into the spaces on the floor that John’s feet had just left, like a child following their parent’s footsteps through deep snow. But then he seemed lucid, afterwards, and embarrassed, and disappeared to his bedroom. Surely he’s improving, on balance - must be. He was always prone to drifting off; way back when, there were plenty of times John would leave Sherlock off in thought, and return hours later to catch only the very end of some incomprehensible digression he was supposed to have been hearing; and there were other times when Sherlock would stop mid-conversation and suddenly be very far away, and walk off with steepled fingers mumbling the same word over and over; and that’s to say nothing of the weeks spent on mind palace expansion and renovation, or the horrors of a messy case. But it was never as bad as this, John is sure. He thinks he’s sure. A week ago, he would have said he remembered Sherlock clearly. 

A terrible sense nags at him: he doesn’t remember it being this hard, or this strange, or this unrewarding.

Milder painkillers. That will do it. Then if no one else turns up, he can leave Sherlock alone here, stay elsewhere for a while, and get out of this flat, and get some space, and be invisible, and leave no trace of anything anywhere. (A thought: is this flat even his? God, Mycroft paid it off way back at the start - shit buggering fuck.) Ever since John saw him in the hospital, even when Sherlock is asleep, his voice, remembered or imagined, harasses John’s every move: _such an empty fridge, John, do you avoid being at home? You’ve not called in to the clinic today, and they will be upset, and why can’t you tell them why you aren’t coming in? Tension in the shoulders John, you’re unnerved; no visitors here for months, John, were you heartbroken? Haven’t you gone back easily to your boring little life with your boring job and dull women. There’s a calendar under your mattress with days ticked off in red pen - counting the days you didn’t pick up your gun? Counting the days you ate? Counting the days you successfully left the flat? Did you do all that for me? Did you really fail to figure it out? You moved my chair, you never touch it, you don’t even pass through that space. Is that sentiment, John? Did you grieve me? John, did you miss this?_

Sherlock shifts on the sofa and John slides the cutting board down the table until he is out of sight. 

A moment later, Sherlock is on his feet and drifting over to the fireplace. John watches him in his peripheral vision. He scratches at his shoulder, staring: absent, John thinks, with a guilty wash of relief. With any luck, he can still get out of the kitchen unobserved. He does his best to rush without it being noticeable. To be caught sneaking in his own kitchen is absolutely not on. 

Sherlock is staring at the books now, rubbing his arm and vacantly mouthing the titles. He’s wearing his old pyjamas. The bottoms are loose, but his chest is strong under the thin t-shirt. He may have lost a touch of weight, but he was in good health before his injuries. Can’t have been too rotten of a time, then; just a year and a half without someone making him eat. He has been cautious not to speculate about Sherlock’s time away. That way lies questions with no satisfying answer. ( _Uncharacteristic lack of curiosity, John, what on earth are you keeping so many arms’ lengths away?_ ) 

John’s knife slips on the tomato and hits the cutting board with a crack. Sherlock’s gaze snaps to him, sharp through the fog. John stops himself from cursing. Sherlock approaches the kitchen, surveying from the threshold.

“Soup?”

John breathes. “Yeah.”

Sherlock eyes the small pile of vegetables and a tiny thicket of green on the cutting board.

“Is that parsley or cilantro?”

“You don’t like cilantro.”

A pause. Damn it. He’s given something away. ( _Remembering my preferences, suggests inclination to…_ )

“So it’s…?”

“Parsley.”

“Ah.” 

They are silent a moment while John finishes with a pepper and fills the sink with soapy dishwater. When he looks up, Sherlock is staring at him from miles away. John steps out of his field of vision, and it doesn’t follow him. Minutes pass. 

“John.”

“Yeah.”

“I should explain.”

In another life, John can hear himself laugh at that. In this one, he stays carefully blank. He fills a clean pot with water and sets it on the stove. Sherlock seems to be waiting for John to respond, so he doesn’t.

“How did we, ah,” he gestures between them, then drops his changes course. “How did I get here?”

“That’s not explaining, that’s inquiring.” John drops two bouillon tablets in the water.

“Yes. It is. Only I don’t - I was in the hospital. Did you bring me here?”

“You know that much.”

“Yes, I was just trying to… alright.” 

He takes a breath. And then he says, “I’m not dead,” then, “That’s good news, surely,” and then, “You’ll have questions.”

John musters up the most inscrutable look he can manage, then turns and regards Sherlock without speaking for a long moment. When Sherlock finally wavers and then averts his eyes, John turns his back to return the unused carrots to the fridge. He is quiet as John putters.

“Where are my clothes?” 

“You’re wearing them.” 

“My old clothes.”

“Look down.”

“Yes obviously these are - I meant my clothes from the…” he waves a hand in the air.

 _Hospital_ , John thinks, or _gap year_.

“I need to see my…,” Sherlock deflates mid-sentence as John goes deadly still, suddenly on alert for danger. 

“What the _fuck_ do you need with those now?”

Sherlock takes a surprised step backwards as John advances, swallowing back fear and anger.

“Nothing, forget I mentioned it.”

“Is this not over, Sherlock?”

“No, it’s - “

“Whatever the hell this was, if it’s not over…,” he shakes his head. “No, sod this. If you’re still working some insane scheme, Sherlock, I swear, you are gone from here. You’re on your own. I really don’t care what happens.”

“It’s over, John, it’s done,” he extends a consolatory hand towards John. “Calm - “

“Oh no,” he laughs murderously at the gesture. “Absolutely not. Let’s get your old clothes, shall we?” he storms off to fetch them from the hallway where they are stuffed into a small shopping bag. He drops it on the table and begins to rifle through. “What’s in here, eh? What do your posh sodding Eurotrash jeans have to say about where the hell you’ve been?”

“John…”

John’s fingers brush ruined cardboard. He clasps a package - unmistakable - and slams the pack of waterlogged French cigarettes down on the table, breathing through his nose to slow his rage. There is a tiny hum of disconnection somewhere in the back of his head, but he doesn’t care. 

“You swore - ”

“John, I - ”

“No, Sherlock, no. I don’t think so.”

And there it is, like clockwork, the most unwelcome of the gifts John’s anger brings him: all of the words, suddenly weaponized and close at hand. After days of silence his mouth is full of _leave_ and _find Mycroft_ and _I won’t do this, don’t tell me about the consequences, they’re yours_.

But Sherlock is rubbing his shoulder, and rolling it while minding the wound in his side. And the problem with Sherlock rubbing his shoulder is that he never moves for nothing, and so there is a reason he’s rubbing his shoulder, and immediately John knows what it is. Memories of the last two days: Sherlock favouring it, shaking it out after sleep, quickly losing feeling in his fingers, the joint cracking loudly and often. Probably broken at some point, and healed badly because it wasn’t treated. Easy to miss, initially; Sherlock was in such a bad way those first few days that a wonky shoulder didn’t even register, but now this particular discomfort persists while the rest is receding and John is forced to recognize what he knows too well: the ghost of a serious shoulder wound. 

Probable nerve damage, possible loss of fine motor function. _God,_ John thinks, _he could lose the violin_.

John inhales deeply, punches his fist into the table, and turns his back.

( _The violin, John, such concern… are you already expecting that you will be there to hear it?_ )

On some level, he realizes, he is. Already it has happened; Sherlock has won. At some point John knows that he will explain this entire mess, his undeath and sudden reappearance and everything, and it will be absolutely mad and absolutely logical, and after some long or short period of time, John will forgive him. He hasn’t even apologized yet, and some stupid part of John begun thinking of them as _reunited_. And what treatment can he expect, for all the years ahead, if he stands for this? John’s anger moves through him like a tornado, picking up stray sentiments -  grief and joy and defeat and humiliation - without ever slowing down.

His rage freezes in the air, turning back on itself, and shame hits him like a wall before his mind goes horribly, suffocatingly blank. 

Soup. He was making soup. 

He turns the dial for the stovetop element. 

He stares into the water, dimly aware that in a few minutes bubbles will begin to percolate and the water will boil and he will add vegetables and chicken and soup will have been made.

Six minutes later, neither of them have spoken, and John realizes there is no heat coming from the stove. He moves the pot to a different element and turns it on. The element glows red.

Fourteen minutes later, John puts a steaming bowl in front of Sherlock and climbs the steps to his room one at a time.

Sherlock, wherever he is, sees none of it. 

 

***

 

Sherlock is not right. He knows he isn’t right because he is seeing impossible things. Not impossible in the way he is impossibly brilliant but impossible like time travel, like gravity turning off while the world still turns. And while he is trying to listen to John, he is being swept away on a fast tide of disbelief.

Something is terribly wrong.

Not possible, absurd, can only be visual hallucination - and yet, he has hallucinated before and this feels different. He was lucid, and paying attention, and he saw. John’s hand, reaching for the stove dial, crumbling like sand around it (impossible) and then reforming after the dial had passed (ludicrous). Ludicrous and clearly, irrefutably seen. By Sherlock Holmes. At his most sober.

And yet physics is infallible, and so something inside Sherlock is wrong.

He runs through a head-to-toe check: all the expected pains, but no delirium. Side in slight pain, shoulder stiff, headache booming, no surprises. Mental spot check: atomic weight of every third element: 6.94, Lithium; 12.011, Carbon; 18.9984032(5), Fluorine; 24.305, Magnesium; 30.973762(2), Phosphorous; alright that will do. No slouch there. 

From somewhere outside him, he hears John climbing the stairs to his bedroom and the click of his door. All this time, still in the upstairs bedroom, and yet the downstairs room is far nicer. Superstitious about it, or profound sentimental interference with logical use of space. Avoidance: well, that’s John Watson all over. 

All this time. So angry about the cigarettes, completely absurd - 19 months hunting an international criminal cartel, a million opportunities to get good and shot, and John chooses lung disease to fret over. (Hrm - chest tightness. Unlikely to be cause of hallucination, but worth keeping an eye on.) 

Mind you, cigarettes have always been rather a sore spot for John which, given their lifestyles before Sherlock died, is hardly rational. Disproportionate evaluation of risk, probably based on undisclosed family history or unpleasantness and duration of negative outcome. Less painful, ultimately, to go by bullet. Certainly quicker. 

Leave it to John to be prudish about addiction - John, who has his own tastes in danger, and whose body takes _walking_ hostage when those tastes aren’t satisfied.  Even apart from the boost to brainwork, smoking is absolutely marvellous; sanctimonious non-smokers always talk about it as though they, lacking in vice entirely, will live forever. All smokers know that they are going to die. A smoker feels the days of their life like money in their pocket, waiting to be spent on this or that. It’s awfully miserly to quibble over a few years.

But this _matters_ to John for some reason, it matters, it’s always mattered. One of their very best fights, in fact, and one of their first real rows, was about this very -  

 

He is pulled elsewhere. His visual stimulae go murky, his body moves without his control, and he sees himself standing at the front window of the living room. He is younger, and he is leaning against the frame of the open window, smoking a cigarette and humming Satie. 

Sherlock knows exactly what night this is. He has just wrapped a triple murder investigation and he is feeling immortal. 

Old, younger John enters, ghostly against the opaque fireplace, and crosses his arms. He has been working himself up to this for a few weeks.

“This isn’t going to work,” John said, and says.

Sherlock sees himself turn in the window. He is pleased to find himself backlit by moonlight and the peachy glow from Baker Street. “I’m sorry?”

“We do the footwork, track down the baddies, get ourselves back to the flat without getting killed, and you celebrate with a tiny step towards suicide,” he shakes his head.

There’s a long, quiet moment, and Sherlock watches them, waiting for it to begin. This is where they bicker, then yell, and then somehow or other both wind up thinking they’ve won. 

It’s strange, watching it now. It’s all quieter than he remembers. Then-Sherlock looks out at the street, gathering his thoughts, and when he turns back into the room Sherlock can see it on his own face: John shakes his head, and it is already decided. 

“John, we’ve been over this. It levels me out as the rush of a case fades. It’s part of my unpacking process. Do you have any idea what happens if I don’t maintain my processes? Upkeep is the key to…”

“It’s also how wake yourself up in the morning, and how you settle yourself for bed; it’s how you keep your focus while you’re working, and how you distract yourself when you’re bored; how you keep yourself going when you haven’t eaten, and how you prepare your stomach for food… do you see what I’m saying here?”

“It’s not impossible for one chemical to offer multiple benefits.”

“Not usually opposite ones.”

“In different contexts, it…”

“How much do you think you’ll enjoy a long, slow hospital death? Because if it’s anything like your days on the couch here, I won’t be visiting.”

It’s no less pleasing now than it was the first time, this early insinuation of permanence. Then-Sherlock looks haughty and mischievous. In retrospect, it is embarrassingly transparent. “I rather thought I’d have us both blown up before then.”

“Or locked up. Lay off the burglary for a few weeks, will you?”

“Please. His Majesty would stop any legal trouble before it started.”

“Oh lovely. You do realize it puts Lestrade in a difficult position.”

“Yes. If only he had any other way to solve crimes."

“He’ll have to do, once the emphysema sets in. And I’ll have to go on and do all the good burgling myself. Can’t do much running with a respirator.”

Sherlock watches himself sigh and extinguish the cigarette on the sill. Is that it? Was that it? John is pleased, but he doesn’t gloat. 

“Have to admit, I’m a touch nervous about you quitting cold turkey. You’re a mean enough bugger as is.”

“No other way. Moderation has never quite been my forte.”

They barely acknowledge each other’s knowing smiles.

“All at once, then?” John ventures, lifting Sherlock’s silver cigarette case off the desk and turning it over in his hands. 

Then-Sherlock is silent as he picks up his violin. He makes sure, obliquely, that John is watching, then flips the bow twice in his hand and turns back to the window to play. 

Sherlock steps out from the kitchen and rounds in front of the coffee table, watching the both of them. He had completely misremembered this. Misremembered, or not seen - how soft John looks, once Sherlock’s gaze is off him, and how utterly chuffed. A ratty old paperback mystery novel is slumped in his chair, and John joins it there. It is, on the whole, the very picture of domesticity. Sherlock Holmes, quitting smoking: the first decision they made together.

On this night, when they have known each other less than a year, and Sherlock has only once heard the name Moriarty, John is imagining with pleasure that Sherlock will live until old age - and maybe even the both of them will, and maybe even together.  _Stupid_ , stupid, he tells himself - it’s always mattered, of course it has. And although he is concerned, of course he is, about the fact that he is watching his own past played out in front of him like ghostly street theatre, and although he is not the man playing the violin in semi-opaques before him, and although some part of him remembers that really John is elsewhere, hurt and angry and barely speaking because of him, more than anything else he is heartened. John is furious with him over cigarettes. And why?

Because his promises from before still matter. 

Then-Sherlock is playing Dvorak’s Cypresses, and then-John is pretending to read, so he thinks he ought to sit down on the couch. He settles down and sets his sore shoulder and arm over the top of the backrest. It’s not comfortable, but when he tries to move he is pinned gently in place. He is cold. He listens to his own violin playing. It is immaculate. John’s ear for music is not subtle enough to require playing this good, but he gets it anyway. Sherlock’s shirt is rucked up on one side, and beneath it he feels wet and warm and cold. He watches then-John in his chair. It was good, what they did that night. He leans forward and a warm touch pushes him back into the couch. He tips his head back and shifts his hips down the cushions. He stares out from under hooded eyes while old, old music fills the flat. 

 


	6. The Middle Distance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lestrade comes by and John hides in the toilet.

Sherlock is quiet through the night, whether he sleeps or not, and John, who is definitely awake for most of it, is not sure if that means he’s getting better or worse. He thinks many times about leaving, but finds in the end that this is his home and he’s reluctant to let himself be driven from it, even under the circumstances. And anyway, he thinks as the sun rises and the city’s morning birds begin calling to each other, he is handling this. 

For example, he has decided that he will go to work today. 

It’s barely half five when he gives up the pretence of sleep and takes the stairs as quietly as he can ( _consideration_ , he thinks, _not creeping_ ), avoiding the loudest floorboards just casually as he starts his day. 

Work is good. Work has many virtues: it’s out of this flat, for one, and it’s full of friendly, uninquisitive colleagues who know little about all of this, and patients too wrapped up in their own discomfort to give a toss about his. He’s not sure what he’ll tell Sarah, but that will come. 

Real life continues, he thinks as he buttons up an unironed shirt. ( _Real life indeed - an endless stream of hypochondriacs, malingerers, and fussing infants. And yet here you are, in your perfectly mundane little job, preferring flu exposure and rectal exams over facing up to -_ )

John is not a genius, so he has run out of imagined observations for the Sherlock in his head to make. It has begun supplementing his paranoia with Holmesian insults. It’s not an improvement.

He watches himself dressing in the bedroom mirror. He looks weary and underslept, but it could easily be confused for the tail end of illness. ( _Nonsense, John, look at your fingernails: worried to the quick._ ) 

He is rehearsing his speech to Sarah when he feels, and he sees, unmistakably, the stiff top button of his trousers push right through his fingers like they are made of thick mud.

He freezes. His mind is blank as a zen monk’s for a beat, then he cautiously pushes the button through the too-small hole. It yields like a solid object, like matter acting on matter, like nothing strange. He pulls on a cardigan and socks, watching carefully for transgressions against physics, of which there are none. He is stiff and unthinking when he grabs his wallet and heads downstairs. All chatter in his mind has utterly ceased.

“‘Morning.”

John is startled. He looks up to see Sherlock seated at the living room table with John’s laptop open before him. 

“Uh, yep.” It’s moronic and wrong, and Sherlock stares back at him, suddenly attentive. 

He is rifling through the kitchen looking for his keys, locked under Sherlock’s scrutiny, when the doorbell rings. A moment later, there are muffled cooing noises from Mrs Hudson and familiar feet on the stairs. 

Lestrade calls into the living room with his usual grim cheer. John does not nearly have time for this, but he’s hopeful somehow that Lestrade will have information or ideas or a shipping address for wayward Holmeses. It’s strange; he hasn’t been here since the old days when he used to show up with cases - or the last time, when he brought a warrant. They greet each other brusquely, as always.

“Greg.”

“John.”

“I was just heading out.” 

“Yeah, sorry I didn’t call ahead. Thought it’s been long enough, someone should check in on you both.”

Sherlock scoffs.

“He’s on the mend. Bandages came off last night. Down to paracetamol and rest, now. ‘Course he’s right there, you can ask him yourself.”

Lestrade rocks uncertainly on his heels. He says, “Yeah, I will,” but he edges into the kitchen as Sherlock turns back to his reading. “So…”

“So.”

“How’re we doing?”

John leans against the counter, folding his arms. “What do you know?”

“‘Bout what?”

John nods in Sherlock’s direction. Sherlock has stood and is pulling the headphones off of the bison’s skull on the wall. He plugs them into the computer and puts them on, the arrogant sod, as if that will convince John he isn’t listening.

“Not much more than you do, sorry to say. ’S part of why I came by, actually, I was hoping by now you’d…”

“I haven’t. I haven’t got a clue.”

“Is he still… I mean, he seems…”

“He’s in and out. That just now was about as good as he gets. Other times, it’s just like he was at the hospital.”

“Well, bit of an improvement, isn’t it?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

Lestrade stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I thought coming off the meds would have…”

“Yeah. So did I.” John shrugs out of his jacket and drops it over a chair. He turns his back to the living room and says, very quietly, “Why is he here, Greg? And where the hell is Mycroft?”

“Don’t know that either, and I’ve been trying to find him since before I even called you. His old number doesn’t connect - “

“None of the numbers have answers. I tried them all. Every sodding Holmes number I was ever given.”

“John, look. I’m sorry this fell to you, alright? As soon as his head is sorted we’ll get him out of here, I promise. I’ll drag him out myself.”

“I don’t need your help for that. He’s gone the moment I’m sure he won’t wander into traffic. I want answers, and I want to know what the hell is going on. This has Mycroft Holmes written all over it, you know it does.”

“Yeah,” Greg rubs his forehead with two fingers. “I’m on it. We’re waiting on lab reports from the other body we found in the river, but we’re pretty sure he gave Sherlock that scratch in his side. ‘Course he could just sodding tell us…”

“He might,” John says bitterly. “Go ask him. Let me know what he says. I’m late for work.”

Lestrade hesitates. “But you say he’s been lucid, now and then…”

“Yeah.”

“So… I mean, don’t get me wrong, mate, I would have punched him and turned him out on the street, myself. I can see not wanting to get into it, believe me. But you haven’t… I mean, he hasn’t…”

“Apologized? Explained?” John’s voice is getting louder and he’s suddenly wary of empty space at his back. He rounds Lestrade and leans back on the wall beside the fridge. “Sherlock? No.”

“But you haven’t tried to…”

“Lestrade!” Sherlock’s voice erupts from the living room. “For God’s sake, come and say whatever it is you came here to say to me.”

It’s just in time, too, because John’s left arm is slowly sinking into the counter. Just barely, just slowly, but sinking beyond doubt. Lestrade turns; he has not seen it. Sherlock, his eyes flicking with helpless fascination between Lestrade and John’s arm, unquestionably has. Panic is rising in John’s chest, and he makes a break, as subtly as he can, for the washroom.

\---

Cold water runs down John’s face while his body shivers with chill and heat. He leans with both hands on the rim of the sink and tries to de-escalate his breathing. 

It’s alright, it’s alright, he repeats to himself - sink, floor, four walls, ceiling, it’s all there. John sees unreal things from time to time, and they haven’t killed him yet. This is by far the strangest of his hallucinations, and strangely timed as well, but it’s nothing he can’t handle. He repeats this to himself.

 As his chest unclenches, he regards himself in the mirror. His fingers have gone soft and numb under his weight on the sink. He flexes them against the porcelain and finds they move slowly, surrounded by cold. He looks down and sees that he is submerged nearly to his wrists in pearled china. 

His breath stalls as he tries to yank himself free, ripping with all his strength and feeling his hands drag slowly through the dense material, then snap away. Though it feels like heavy icewater closing around his freed fingers, the surface of the porcelain is undisturbed.

Okay, he thinks, okay.

His vision is clear. He is calm. He can hear Lestrade and Sherlock speaking in quiet, urgent tones a room away. The bathroom smells its usual smell of faint mildew and soap. Nothing else is out of line. He flexes his hands. They feel loose and cold, as they sometimes do when he panics. Is he panicking now? After all this time, he isn’t sure.

He presses two fingers experimentally against the side of the sink. With a little pressure, they slide through the veneer. He freezes, watching his hand breach solid matter. The veneer is hard and cold against his third knuckles, but his fingertips are submerged. The inside of the porcelain feels like ossified coral. He draws smoothly out.

Okay.

He backs up and sits down on the closed lid of the toilet. He rests his elbows on his knees and his face on his upturned palms. Okay, it’s not okay yet. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms, letting the whole weight of his head press down as he inhales through his nose like Ella and a dozen other shrinks have told him to. He sees stars behind his closed eyelids, and the rubbing is such a relief, until he feels his palms sink just minutely through the papery membrane of his eyelids and brush his pupils. His eyes try to clench closed and his palms try to rip away, and for a horrifying half second they move slowly, so slowly, through each other, unable to do either. And then he is free, and staring at his hands like they are alien grafts.

Outside, Lestrade and Sherlock are talking. John can only think that he has been in the bathroom for a suspiciously long time and Lestrade will be thinking by now that he is in here having some kind of breakdown. He stares at his own impossible hands and smothers his panic. He considers the best way to avoid undue attention.

He carefully maneuvers his mobile from his pocket and it settles in his hand. He texts Sarah - “Flu bug, up all night. Can I swap you for the late shift?” - then steadies himself and heads for the living room.

Lestrade is standing across from Sherlock in his chair, hands in his pockets, looking incredulous. Their conversation has ground to a halt. At the last moment before John comes into his view, Sherlock breaches the silence to say, only, “Precisely.”

Lestrade rubs his forehead and exhales into his hand. They both look up when John’s footsteps hit a creaking floorboard. Discussing him, then. Terrific.

“Alright?”

“Yeah. Yes. Sure.”

John drifts back into the kitchen and swings his arms into his jacket. 

“Sherlock was just telling me about - “

John’s mobile interrupts. Good old Sarah, always quick with the response. He takes it out and makes a show of reading the text. “Ah. That’s Sarah. It’s dead at the clinic, I’m not needed today. It’s good, actually - we’re out of everything and I haven’t been able to get to the shop. Greg, you’ll be here a few minutes, yeah? You can keep an eye on… things?”

Sherlock nearly succeeds at suppressing an eye roll. 

“Yeah, I suppose. I’ve got to be gone in about twenty minutes…”

“Perfect,” John replies, snatching his keys which are peeking out from under an empty bread bag. “Ta.”

He shuffles a bit on the stairs to stifle the sound of Lestrade’s objections.

 

***

 

Despite Lestrade’s characteristic overestimation of his ability to problem-solve, he’ a welcome sight. Like John, he appears not to be seeing Sherlock for the first time since his return, and without any memory of their interactions, Sherlock, for once, opts to shut his mouth. 

“Yeah, sorry I didn’t call ahead. Thought it’s been long enough, someone should check in on you both.”

Typical. John is transubstantiating, Sherlock can’t tell what year it is, and Lestrade is here to see that all is well. Terrific.

But then he follows John into the kitchen, so Sherlock bites back his natural objection to not being the point of greatest interest in the room. (He must have already explained himself to Lestrade, then, at least enough to dull his curiosity.) Lestrade, whatever his shortcomings, has always been on Sherlock’s side (the one time excepted) and has always had John’s ear; the word of a friendly third party may be just the thing. 

Privacy is hard to come by in the openness of the main room, but headphones will help. 

Of course, it’s impossible not to keep something of an eye on them, just peripherally. This is a delicate business all round, and one can’t afford to miss things. Also one is rather a good lip reader. 

But then John’s arm goes off again ( _curious_ ) like the stove dial the day before; against the countertop this time, and what is Lestrade doing, he’s got him cornered like an animal, you really don’t want to do that with John, formidable fight or flight response, flight being very much the less likely. But shit ( _shit_ ), either John has broken physics or Sherlock is not entirely in his right mind right now. So what is this? He thought he was just coming back from the dead, but no one here seems to have any damn questions for him. They are all curiously uncurious for those in the presence of someone who recently faked his own death, so maybe - maybe - he’s wrong. Maybe he has been back for a while, or it’s some other time, and all of this is… what is this? A mix of memory and normal time unfolding? Come to think of it, time has been rather a mess lately. His mind palace turned, what, set piece? And what on earth would be the point of that? Endlessly reliving the past with no chance to interv… intervene, _intervene_. Can he intervene?

“Lestrade!” He feels like a man in the desert throwing punches at a mirage. Should probably try to act natural, though, just in case. “For God’s sake, come and say whatever it is you came here to say to me.”

And sure enough, there, Lestrade turns and John is terrified but grateful as he slinks away unnoticed. 

“Yeah, getting to that, actually,” Lestrade returns, taking a few steps back into the living room. “How are the ribs?”

“Touchy.”

“And the head?”

“Rotting.”

“Well, you’re up to answering questions, apparently, so it’s not all rot. Start with why the hell we found you washed up on the side of the Thames, and who we found with you.”

Ah, data. He was right, then, it’s just after he has returned. Washed up on the - right. Travel, the endless night, and Moran in the Oratory, a long chase through the city, and a watery end to it all. Yes, of course. Knife wounds, and this would be the aftermath of hypothermia and partial asphyxiation. No wonder his lungs ache.

“Sebastian Moran. He’s a military-trained assassin who tried to kill you, me, and everyone else in this building. Not co-incidentally, he was also the inheritor of Jim Moriarty’s criminal legacy, and his contacts.”

“And what happened to him?”

“I broke his neck over a bridge railing.”

Lestrade winces: _don’t tell me about your crimes, we’ve been over this._

Sherlock shrugs: trust. 

“And he ended up in the water…?”

“Because I threw his body over, yes.”

“And you ended up in the water…?”

“Because in our struggle his belt caught on the inside of my coat, and I didn’t notice until it was pulling me over the railing after him.”

“Jesus. You weren’t half dead when we found you. What’s… alright, we’ll need you at the station for details about that - I think I can hold them off for a few days while you get yourself sorted, but. Now explain why you’re alive.”

“Yes, so far no one seems overly pleased about that.”

“No one understands it, Sherlock. You were dead. We all… there were consequences.”

“Moriarty. This was the only way to…,” he shifts in his seat, unsurprised to find he is not proud of this. “Come on, you found his body I’m sure, obvious suicide wound. What, did you think Moriarty, Richard Brook, whoever you thought he was, did you think he killed himself for nothing? That I killed myself for nothing? That made sense to you? Really?”

“Not entirely, no, but not much did at that point.”

“It was the last phase of his plan for me. He had arranged for three snipers - one on John, one on Mrs. Hudson, and one on you. I jump to my death or you’re all shot.”

“Jesus.”

“It was the only way I could… I had to be seen to die, do you understand?” He needs to understand, if he can’t make Lestrade understand what hope is there.

“You figured it out in advance, though - must have done. Not even you could stand on a rooftop and fake your death spontaneously. You should have come to us.”

“Yes, perhaps you’ve forgotten this little detail, Lestrade, but you had turned me into a fugitive around this time. The police weren’t overly concerned with my protection. Or John’s.”

“You turned yourself into a fugitive. Besides, the evidence at the time was overwhelming. You of all people must appreciate that.”

“Oh, I do. Lovely time for you to begin following the evidence, by the way.”

“Oy, listen. Free advice: when you tell this story to John - which you need to do _immediately_ , by the way, and I don’t know why in hell you haven’t already - skip the insults. You weren’t around for the fall-out, Sherlock, so don’t assume there’s anyone involved who hasn’t paid for the choices they made.”

“Then don’t assume I haven’t, either. And believe it or not, John is not the easiest person in the world to navigate when completely furious.”

“I don’t know what he is and I don’t know it matters. It’s yours to fix either way. It could only help, knowing you did all this for his sake, really.”

Sherlock goes very still. He has not considered this before. “Is that what you think I did?”

“What? Well, the… the snipers. You faked your death and took them all out to protect him, didn’t you? That’s… well, on any other man, you’d call it noble.”

It has somehow escaped his calculations that ordinary people might read the situation differently than he did. How, after all this time, does he still miss things like this? He shakes his head: rotting, absolutely. Ordinary people would want most of all to save their own lives. Of course they would. As if he needed further evidence that the average person carries within them the scarlet thread of murder.

“Nobility,” Sherlock grins bitterly. “Indeed. And that’s how you’d have me put it to John?”

“Well, isn’t that what happened?”

“No.”

“What d’you mean?”

He shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He reaches for a wording that does not humiliate him. “I don’t stand for murders being committed on my behalf.” It’s not quite the truth, but it’s close enough.

Lestrade crosses his arms and stares at him. “So you… if you hadn’t been able to fake it, I mean, you would have actually…”

There is the sound of John’s nervous footfalls in the hallway, trying to sound casual. Sherlock gives it a long moment before he answers, “Precisely.” 

John pads into view, then straight back into the kitchen. He’s still pretending that he will go to work today, as though he - ah, yes, that will be the text telling him not to come in. Poor John, cursed with such an honest face and such a total lack of guile. Terrible way to go through life - means you’re always being lied to.

Lestrade is trying to draw John into the conversation, and John is escaping. John is gone. The crowd outside hums and then dies down. He won’t have liked that.

“Sherlock.”

“Mm?”

“Tell him.”

“I’ve been trying.”

“Try harder.”

He has no response to that, so he turns back to the laptop.

“You’re mad. Look, I was also hoping you’d know something about what’s happened to your brother. I’ve been looking for him.”

Sherlock is cold. Draft from the door, he supposes. No, of course Mycroft hasn’t turned up - otherwise he’d be at Mycroft’s flat instead of here. “I don’t know. We were in regular contact while I was away, but I haven’t heard from him in two weeks, maybe more - I’m not sure what day it is. He was tracking key figures in Moriarty’s group, supplying me with information.” He pauses, then says, evenly, “Under the circumstances, I expect he is dead. Either way, you won’t find him.”

Lestrade is quiet a moment. He takes a few steps towards the window and turns his head away. _Interesting_. “Either way, I want him found.”

“I imagine the family will as well, if only to divide the estate.” Sherlock, for no appreciable reason, feels he should offer something better than that. “He helped me immensely, while I was gone. And before. I will find him, once I’m… better able.”

“Yeah, speaking of. John says you’re still in and out. What’s going on in that giant head of yours?”

“I don’t know,” he is surprised by the urge to be candid. “I’m a bit, a bit…”

“Unfocused?”

“No,” Sherlock realizes. “Too focused. I think about some little thing and then I’m down the rabbit hole, and then I’m seeing whatever-it-is right in front of me, walking through it, and then it’s some time later when I find myself back to reality.”

“Sounds like your, your whatever, your mind palace.”

“No, the mind palace is for storing things in an orderly way, so they can be accessed and then put back: preservation, yes, but also containment. You have no idea how much I remember, Lestrade. The details can be overwhelming. Without containment, there are no limits, and effective data sorting becomes completely impossible.”

“And all that about not having containment, that doesn’t sound like what’s going on right now?”

Sherlock considers. 

“Was it like this before you… before the injuries?”

“I’m not sure,” he reflects. Hard to access this kind of data about oneself. “I was alone, usually. A bit of action, here and there - short bursts, a few hours spent on a confrontation, usually nothing more. Question or search the operative, then neutralize them. Then retreat with data.”

“So mostly brain work.”

“Yes.”

“For, what, days at a time?”

“Or weeks.”

“Locked in a room on your own?”

“Investigating - in the field, more often than not, though I kept a cabin in Switzerland. Lots of tracking, evidence-gathering. Here and there.”

“And where’s that?”

“Continental Europe, mostly, though I was in Singapore for a while.”

Lestrade looks him up and down. “Sherlock, exactly how many people did you… what, neutralize?”

“If you’re asking how many international killers, smugglers, forgers, and black market information brokers were operating two years ago who are not operating now, the answer is dozens - all of whom are more my brother’s concern than yours.”

“And if I’m asking how many people were neutralized the way you neutralized Moran?”

Sherlock is silent. He stares Lestrade down, unmoved. Of all the things he’s done, he will not apologize for this: breaking his body over and over to snuff out those who conspired to kill everyone in this world who ever mattered. 

“Right. Crikey.”

“But, as I’ve said, most of it wasn’t nearly so exciting.”

“And they never figured out that you were trailing them?”

“Oh, a few did. But not generally until it was too late. Men like that accumulate enemies. Mostly I got the information I needed and then then put them in their enemies’ paths and let nature take its course. Less messy on my part. And at all costs, as you can imagine, I had to keep them all from suspecting that I was alive - otherwise you’d all have been dead before I even made it to an airport. So mostly it was a matter of meticulous planning and study.”

“Mostly brain work. Lots of brain work, lots of details, over and over with lots of different people, lots of time on your own.”

“You’re suggesting that this, whatever it is, is what happens to me when I’m left to my own devices.”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Lestrade rises and shoulders his jacket. “But you are different. And you’ve been almost two years on your own, without anyone around to remind you to take care of yourself. I don’t know, Sherlock. You don’t want my opinion on this, but it’s almost like… I mean, from what I can see, it doesn’t look so different from when…”

“Don’t.”

“I know. I know, but you had been alone a long time then, too. That’s all I’m saying.”

 

 


	7. Under Study

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sherlock eventually asks good questions.

Science. That’s what is required. Physics can’t be broken, but people can. Parameters can always be tested, we need only be methodical.  
  


\---  
  


 **January whatever.** (Day 4(??) at 221B)

 

 **09:42**.  Lestrade gone. John overdue to return, probably looking for distractions from his arm thing. Hiding. Odd choice, running out: who hides in public? Quite sure he forgot about the crowd, would have been a fight to get away. Suppose he always did like to storm out when things went poorly. 

Estimated planning time until his return: twenty minutes.

 

 **10:09.** John home. Clearly forgot he was meant to be doing a grocery. Got bread and nearly expired milk from the corner shop, ditched the bag so I wouldn’t see the logo (as if I needed it). Observed him putting away same; no tactile difficulties. Apparent turnaround from earlier. He is oddly cautious in his movements; aware of his change, then, and either bracing to see if it happens again or consciously trying to stop it happening. Unlikely to be within his mental control. No conceivable mechanism that would allow it. 

 

 **10:36**. Pushed stool into John’s way. He tripped, nothing unusual. Multiple hypotheses.

 

**10:51.**

_Hypothesis 1: Effects of attention._

Perhaps John is able to control or mitigate effects through concentration on movements. Asked John to move box of books out of bedroom and into living room. Box is heavy and falling apart, takes focus to move. Would expect weight to cause trouble, unless conscious intention can limit transformation. Box moved with no evidence of material change and a pleasant amount of grumbling. John has been trying not to grumble since Return. Reasons unknown.

 

 **11:19**. Problem: What if effect is simply inconsistent? If it just comes and goes, all past and future results invalidated. Must think up a set of control parameters.

 

 **11:23**. Of course it wouldn’t simply come and go - inconsistencies far more likely to be explained by methodological issues or previously unconsidered variables than randomness, of all things. Good lord. Have not run controlled trials in far too long. Will remain alert to further signs of personal mental deterioration.

 

 **11:25**. Reconsidering whether all this isn’t my own hallucination. Really does seem most likely, under the circumstances.

 

 **11:28**. Concerns abated; subject just tried and failed to lift the mail off the coffee table. Very well, onwards.

Smooth motion, hand slowing down to pass through the paper, occurring in a moment of inattention: tentative support for Hypothesis 1. 

 

 **11:34**.

_Hypothesis 1.1:  Effects of Attention: Control._

Asked subject to pass the mail, to get him focused on it. Was sat in his chair, facing away, but watched his response in computer screen reflection.

Subject attempted once to pick it up, failed, told me to get it myself and departed upstairs. 

So aware of the change (of course), and focusing on the action may provide some limited help, but it’s ultimately beyond his control. Unsurprising.   


Problem: he was not paying attention when he hit the stool. So why trip?

 

 **12:57**.

_Hypothesis 2: Qualities of objects acted upon_

Does material matter? So far counters, mail, and stove dial cause problems, while clothing, stools, cutlery, food, and a paperback novel have not. Mail vs novel most perplexing; both paper objects of comparable weight and shape, and yet one can be held and the other not. Suggests other factors determinative.

Of course, stupid. If material were a factor, wooden stool and wood floor would yield same result. Subject is demonstrably not sinking through floor.

Floor example likewise suggests that force does not matter; some needed, surely, to make the difference between touch and penetration, but if weight of subject’s body not sufficient to put him through the floor, safe to assume a limited effect.

Other qualities of the problematic vs unproblematic objects? Problematic objects all kitchen-related, or at least happened to be in kitchen when the trouble occurred. A kitchen problem? No, that’s rubbish; for one, if it were a localized issue then subject would avoid that space like the plague. Subject has been spending an inordinate amount of time in bedroom or otherwise out of sight, but no specific aversion to kitchen. What else? Unproblematic objects more personal in nature, more uniquely subject’s property - but no, surely mail is personal and uniquely belonging to subject, at least more so than stool, which sits mostly unused in the lounge. You could call it a pattern, perhaps, but nothing like a rule. 

Slightly concerned that all of this appears to be actually happening. Always a relief to find oneself in one’s right mind, of course, but must admit some distress at casual violations of both physics and biology.  


 

~~**13:22**. Means the past can’t be changed, no intervening. Of course. Stupid to think. ~~

 

 **13:29.** Subject has returned. Used washroom, now drinking glass of water. Forgot both book and laptop downstairs. Condition degenerating: long in washroom, struggled with both glass and tap. Cannot imagine what subject has been doing for the last two hours. Will try.

 

 **13:36**.

_Hypothesis 3: Environmental factors: ????_

Suppose I could ask.

 

 **13:37**. Subject retreated upstairs. I am not welcome to follow. Will use this time to contemplate further avenues of research.

 

 **14:55**.

~~ Well. ~~

~~ Not sure what to ~~

Was contemplating a walk. Hardly reached the stairs before subject appeared, asked where I was going and why. (Still listening for me, then.) Hardly any sound on subject’s approach; given our rotten floorboards, suggests change in weight. Remembered the crowds at this point, and thought that fabricating a need would cause subject to leave flat to procure it, and thought honesty would concern or infuriate subject, so conceded and stayed in. But not before subject’s clenched fist slipped right through the banister before our very eyes.  


Uncomfortable moment, both gaping at each other like idiots. Subject wanted me not to have seen. I wanted to ask. ~~I wanted to~~

Said nothing. Subject said nothing; confirmed I was alright and went back upstairs. 

 

 **15:51**.

_Hypothesis 4: Subjective factors_

Cannot possibly be expected to test for that. How could it even be done?

 

 **18:10**. It is now dark. No sound from upstairs in well over two hours. Sleep unlikely.  


John hasn’t eaten in eleven hours.

Slightly concerned.  
  


\---  
  


It’s half eleven when he hears John creep down to the kitchen. The lights are off in the flat. He has been silent as the grave for well over an hour, locked in his room with the door closed, hoping John will believe he’s asleep.   


Whatever is going on, it’s worsening. John is so slow and noiseless on the stairs. Sherlock edges off the bed and treads a path of silent floor boards to his door. He puts his hands and forehead to it, solid and cool, tasting the texture of the wood with his fingertips and listening for John, whose body might very well pass right through it.  


He closes his eyes and watches by sound. Vividly, the kitchen: John there, his stomach past grumbling, sunk with a miserable rot. The sink running, the kettle filling and then crashing to the bottom of the sink, having slipped through his fingers. John cursing quietly. (Sherlock puts one hand around the doorknob. When is it time to intervene?) Water still, falling further than before, filling up the kettle where it sits in the basin, and then the kettle placed a bit clumsily on the counter. Switch flicked.   


Fridge door opened just a few inches, and falling back closed. A quick stagger and it’s open again; several seconds later, the sound of the fridge light switching on. God. He imagines John opening it slowly, alternating his two hands as they pull against the handle and slip through. A moment later, it shuts unassisted.   


John settles at the table a few minutes later, and Sherlock waits. When the rustling of newspaper is loud enough, Sherlock slides to the ground, rests his back against the door, and listens.  
  


\---  
  


At some point in the night he must have nodded off, because his mobile wakes him up when it buzzes.  

His back hurts. When he reaches for the phone, his tailbone screams into the floorboards.   
  


_Outside._   
  


Well, of course, he thinks a touch angrily. Who else?

John is long gone from the kitchen and, with any luck, in a deep or confused enough sleep that he doesn’t hear Sherlock shrug into his parka and slip out. 

The cold bites at his face and the exposed sides of his head. He longs for his real hair, his scarf, his proper coat. In a few days, when the news of his return has settled, it will be good riddance to this miserable parka, the great rustling diaper that it is.

But he’s not the only one who is recently undead.

A sleek black car waits a half-block up the empty street, idling with its lights off.

Heat assails him when he opens the door and slides into the back seat. In this goosedown, he will be sweating in minutes. Of course, in his lightweight winter wool, Mycroft is cool as ever. Tosser.

Sherlock closes the door behind him and says, casually as he can, “I did wonder.”

“Oh, brother, I’m nearly touched. You know very well how hard I am to kill.”

Sherlock scoffs. “No one is immortal. Us least of all.”

“You would know, I suppose. How is resurrection?”

“Far closer to non-resurrection than I would have liked.”

“So I see. The knife wound is healing well. The headaches will go in their own time. In the end, I’d say you’ve come out fairly unscathed.”

Sherlock raises his eyebrows in challenge.

“Present troubles aside,” Mycroft amends, pausing. “And I admit to some concern for John.”

“You’ve taken your time coming out of the woodwork.”

“Yes, the other roaches and I have had a lovely twelve-day stay in a Vauxhall bunker, which pleasure I owe entirely to your adventures. I applaud your taste in adversaries.”

“Moran?”

“Yes, and I must say, we rather underestimated his reach - though you’ve put that issue to rest. So to speak.”

“A sleeper cell.”

“Among other things. The worst of it was a communications breach; my personal channels were blocked, my contacts accessed. It’s been decades since we’ve been so compromised; the technological arms race being what it is, we didn’t think it possible anymore.”  


“The code that unlocks doors.”  


“Apparently, yes. Oh don’t self-immolate, I thought it was bluster as well. We both overlooked it.”

“And so you were shipped off to security quarantine,” Sherlock says, thinking of the morning in Meiringen when he failed to receive a text.

“Yes, along with select staff and contacts. My office is the nerve centre for the nation’s intelligence; the process of containment was immense.”

“We had other means of communication arranged. You could have sent word.”

“Yes, I could have. In fact, I would have liked nothing better - I don’t mind admitting that I rather worried over you.”

“But?”

“But,” he concedes with a long-suffering sigh. “I thought you’d rather I didnt.”

“Mycr -“

“Moran issued me a personal notice, when the breach began. He made it clear that if I had any further contact with you, he would execute John immediately. I considered our back-up methods, but at the time we did not know how our communications had been intercepted, and there was no way to know conclusively which he would be watching. I confess, I would still have preferred to contact you, for your own protection - he was waiting for you, as you know, and he had proven himself formidable. But after some reflection, I…”

“Rightly concluded that I would never have forgiven you for doing so.”

“…Yes.”

“Regardless, I killed Moran ages ago, and you knew he was last. I don’t appreciate being kept in the dark.”

“No,” he muses pointedly. “I don’t imagine you do.”

They sit in silence while Sherlock considers his words. 

“I’m not sure I should be here.”

“Mm? You needn’t worry about being publicly seen, Sherlock, you’re back among the living.”

“You know that’s not what I…,” he hisses: damn prying prat, always poking at things. Despite their tenuous peace, he hates the idea of showing Mycroft the contours of this problem. “John is not… It’s not that I thought he’d be pleased, or that there wouldn’t be apologies to make. But I thought…,” he shifts in his seat. “I thought there would be time to explain. To apologize.”

Mycroft opens his mouth to speak, but Sherlock rushes on.

“You should have come earlier, or sent someone. Hospital on, I shouldn’t have been here.”

“I regret that I was in quarantine until quite recently - a matter of hours. Under better circumstances, I would agree. Believe me, I thought of smuggling you out to Essex until all of this blows over. I still could, if you so desire. But as it is, I’m rather loathe to intervene,” he pauses. “You should stay.”

“I am doing damage every moment I’m in that flat.”

“Perhaps,” Mycroft is eyeing him as if it were possible to see his brain, ambitions and delusions and all, laid out in front of him. “And yet removing yourself now would be unwise.”

“I don’t know how to fix this.”

“You won’t. And yet it will be fixed.”

“Oh, smoke and prophecy.”

“You will never know how truly I regret that some things are beyond strategy. But here it is: there is still something very wrong in you, Sherlock, and there is something terribly wrong in John. I’ve not seen this before and I won’t pretend to understand it, but perhaps you can. You need to see this through. You both do.”

Sherlock puts his hands in his pockets and nudges his chin into the collar of his coat. 

He says, quietly, “This is not what I had planned.”

Mycroft smiles, and for the first time in many years, it is warm. “Nor I.” 

“Well, I suppose I am glad you aren’t dead.”

“Thank you, brother, and likewise.”  


Sherlock opens the car door and hesitates. “You should tell Lestrade. He’s been looking for you.”

Mycroft smothers his surprise. “Well. It must be lovely to be so unaware of one’s limitations.”

“That’s the Yard for you: keen at all the wrong moments.”

He steps out of the car and looks up the street. An empty night bus passes through the intersection at the end of the road.  

“Sherlock.”

He looks down at Mycroft, who is leaning gracelessly for once across the seat.  His waistcoat is creased, the shoulders bunched inelegantly, and a stray lock of hair has fallen across his high forehead.

“You have survived your trials, brother. John is still surviving his. Remember, and help him.”

 

*****

 

John wakes up because he has stopped breathing. 

He jolts awake, desperately dragging at air through his mouth and nose, both of which are full of dense cotton. It’s like having a cloth held firm over his face, except also inside it. He tries to break free, tries to thrash his limbs, but his front and shoulders are submerged in thick flannel and his legs are tangled up among springs and cold air. He kicks because he can kick and his body is screaming _do something_ , and he pushes up with his arms as best he can, which is nothing because they are trapped, they move through the dry material like thick wax, and he is sinking deeper, the more he struggles, further into the space with the springs, and then his leg kicks down and clear of it all and collides with the floor. His lungs are burning, he is running out of time, so he fights his way downwards, down through sedimentary layers of cotton and wood, until he can open his mouth to the dusty space full of springs, where he heaves in air so thick with detritus he coughs it all back out in rib-crushing spasms, his ribs which seize around the coiled metal running through them, and he keeps fighting until he drops onto the floor below his bed and rolls clear.

He is naked and shivering. He coughs up ash until he is almost sick, and sucks in huge panicked breaths. His dressing robe is slumped beside him on the floor, and he pulls it over his chest, but even that minimal weight escalates his panic, so he tosses it aside.

He recites advice from therapists: breathe through your nose. Count the blue things you can see. Ground yourself, touch your surroundings and feel them. Alright, no, not that last one, it’s okay breathe breathe in through the nose out through the mouth, box breaths _in_ two three four _hold_ two three four _out_ two three four. It’s okay, it’s okay, the danger has passed. 

None of it works right away, but in another few minutes his panic subsides, leaving him sweat-soaked and freezing. He sits up and looks at the bed. He is exhausted. The blankets are still on top, folded in loose peaks around the shape of an absent body in the middle of the mattress. He pulls his warmest jumper off the footboard and tugs it over his head. It holds him together, just like it would a real person. 

Alright, he thinks, so it’s getting worse.

There’s no hiding. He has fared poorly over the last day, under the sustained heat of Sherlock’s bizarre and obsessive scrutiny, but he can’t pass another afternoon in this room, alternately ignoring the problem and googling hopelessly for solutions, for hints, for any suggestion that anyone else in the history of the world has ever been so god damned miserable that they ceased to be solid sodding matter.

Or maybe, he thinks as he scrubs at his face, he could. Maybe he could hide out here indefinitely, and no one would come looking for him, and even Sherlock would be so elsewhere in his head, so unwilling to come into this terrible space, that weeks would pass and John could slowly change his nature, slowly here in private where nothing need be seen. It would be a relief, he thinks, to just let go…

But no. That’s a voice he’s heard before, and no. He staggers unevenly to his feet and pulls on his pyjama bottoms. He focuses all his attention on picking up a towel, willing his hand to close around it rather than through. (Don’t picture yourself slipping through the floor, falling between storeys, hitting cold earth and still sinking down…) A shower, traditionally - it all feels better after a shower.

After two-handed struggles with the door and the taps and the curtain, he edges into hot water, and he can feel his skin reaching for the heat of the steam. His skin which doesn’t touch things properly anymore.

He puts the whole of his body under the spray, closing his eyes as water drags his hair down across his forehead. He takes his pulse at the throat: still racing, but not sounding quite so much like the heart attack that took his father in his fifties. Rivulets of wet heat are pulling the tension out of his muscles, rinsing him clean of impossible nonsense, restoring him to factory settings.

He opens his eyes and exhales sadly. Below him, his body is running away down the drain in water turned the colour of skin and waste. Bits of himself are curling into steam, dissipating. He puts his arms around himself and watches it all go.

 


	8. Victor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sherlock remembers and John is lost.

Sherlock stirs half-awake in the indigo sea of his bedroom. He registers the sound of water somewhere, running through very old pipes. He is disoriented by sleep. It’s his Baker Street bedroom, but things are not where they should be. All of his things have leaked out of their drawers, and someone has boxed them all up and stacked them like he is just coming or going. He tries to burrow back down into sleep, but a box in the corner catches his eye. Something about the angle and the colours peeking out under the folded lid, a flash of scarlet and blue, and the room is changing. As he edges out of bed and drifts towards the box, the walls around him solidify into a uniform late nineties green that someone wrongly thought neutral. He is back in the dormitories at uni, approaching a crate full of records stashed under a desk. He knows that the sounds of other students preparing for the night’s revelry will be leaking through his walls, but he does not actually hear them. 

He picks up the box and sets it on the dresserdesk. Inside, records peek out through their newsprint wrapping. He thumbs through the titles: Britten, Cave, Cage, Glass, Pop, Wagner, the big six of his teen years and the only companions he brought with him to Cambridge. He lifts one out at random - _Abattoir Blues_. Yes, quite right. Down the desk, his record player is graying with dust. He lifts a CD stereo off its top, plugs it in, and puts on the album. The sound, when it comes, is incongruous, though he can’t quite put his finger on the reason. He looks around the little room with its sombre walls and its single bed. It’s overlaid with impulses for a different time, somewhere a little ways down the road when things are worse and not yet better again.

He has a sense of himself waiting for someone. Someone with whom things are going to end badly. Someone he currently cares for, someone it is strange to be apart from. 

Ah, Victor.

It’s late in their short relationship - of course it is, look at all these boxes. They don’t even know each other that well, not yet, but they’ve been spending almost all of their time together for the last few weeks. He is experiencing something new, in this process, something he was unprepared for. He remembers the intuitive leap to trusting Victor, to loving him. It will turn out that there are excellent reasons to love Victor, but he doesn’t know that yet. It will all come so quickly, and all at the end.

It’s late, but it’s not the end yet. In another week or two, he will ruin it all. He will break into the chem lab on Lensfield, then break into it again to flout Victor’s pleading, and then he will be caught. He will run off to London, and when he returns he will have tried cocaine and seen his first murdered body. It will all be beginning, and Victor will be so hurt, so worried, so desperate to keep him from leaving Cambridge. And Sherlock will not see why Victor wants him, or wants him close, and no sincere apologies will be possible. When he is safely away and it is too late to return, he will tell himself that Victor is small and sentimental, however beautiful his slim shoulders and clear unspoiled eyes. 

All this has already happened, and it is happening, it will happen. From where he is standing, listening to records in the darkness and waiting for a date, it is all inevitable.

There are footsteps in the hall, and they stop outside his door. He prepares himself. There is a faint knock. He hears rain - but that’s wrong, it was a clear night. Is it raining outside?

He looks at the window, and his reflection in the glass stops him dead - his hair is too light, his face too weary. He is in the wrong time. It’s not uni, it’s after all of that. It’s after everything.

John, not Victor, nudges open the door.

“Sherlock? You okay?”

He is surprised by how soft John looks, and how old, and how kind, and how withdrawn. He knows it’s the future, it’s the present, and there has been damage done. He can feel the flux of time, and he can see that it’s all in motion, that right now nothing is inevitable. 

This isn’t lost, it isn’t lost. Not yet.

He is staring. 

John never usually enters this room. His hair is wet and his skin is pink from heat. His mouth hangs slightly open when he’s uncertain.

“Er, sorry. It’s just you don’t normally play records at half four in the morning. Violin, sometimes, but not… I didn’t know you had a system in here.”

“Yes.”

“Right,” John looks down. He is towel-rumpled and small.

“John, I… I’m sorry. I don’t know how to fix it.”

John runs a palm over his face. “Sherlock, turn the music off.”

“I need to…”

“No. You’re miles away, I can tell. Jesus, look at you. Come on, turn that off.”

He pulls the needle from the record, filling the room with hissing silence. 

“Right. Back to sleep. Both of us.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening to you.”

John freezes. With all his compact light, he seems so faint against the room’s darkness. “I’m not… no. It is a godless hour and you are... Just go to sleep.”

“But…”

“No.” John lets the door close behind him on its own power. 

 

***

 

John spends most of the next morning lying on his bedroom floor, imagining that he will fall back to sleep, or else get up to find the morning paper stuffed with news of folks across the country losing their corporeality and then gaining it back with one simple remedy, or else rise to find that Sherlock has no memory of the night before and is moving out besides, and there’s nothing and no one left in the world to come out of the woodwork and surprise him ever again. He shivers, exposed to the cool morning air; he has not bothered with blankets. Blankets don’t observe his boundaries anymore. Only his pyjamas, which he has not removed in a day and a half now, stop at his skin. They feel like a container holding him in.

It’s well after noon when he drags himself out of his room and down into the main of the flat. He knows very well that Sherlock is awake; he’s been puttering around the lounge all morning, and short of importing a rooster he’s done everything possible to make sure John isn’t sleeping. Still, it’s quiet when John’s socked feet touch the linoleum of the kitchen. 

An offering is waiting for him: beans and toast, warming on the stove. He suspects they have already gone cold once and been reheated, and when he leans over the open rubbish lid he can see six other slices, tossed away untouched. He sighs at the waste of food; Sherlock has been camped out for hours. John runs a hand through his hair and thinks, well that’s it. Can’t shower safely, can’t cook. When Sherlock sodding Holmes thinks you can’t take care of yourself, it’s time to admit that you bloody well can’t.

His stomach grumbles. He has not eaten since the previous morning, a miserable mush of oats, and he is hungry as he hasn’t been in years. On the subject of food, he is past humiliation. He eyes the toast and prays the silence will keep for long enough that he can eat it and disappear unseen.

When he reaches to pick it up, his hand ghosts through it without even slowing. Toast and plate and counter, all at once.

He tries a second time. 

Then he tries with both hands, and then tries to lift a butter knife to use as a lever, and then, a bit desperately, he bends and tries to pick it up directly with his teeth. He only tastes the toast for a second as it passes through the top of his tongue, undisturbed as his teeth fail to close on anything at all.

The rumble in his stomach quiets. He swallows tears of frustration and hunger. He wonders if this means that he will starve.

His body feels as light as air. He thinks of the clouds over Kandahar, fluffed and deconstructed, like a drop of milk dissipating in an unshaken body of water. He feels that light and that far away. He thinks of cotton candy he ate once at a fair with a girl from uni, and of the nothing it weighed on his tongue before it collapsed into crystal sugar. He thinks of the mist coming off the dry ice at Harry’s wedding, not light enough to ascend like smoke nor heavy enough to settle like fog, moving evenly on its path when blown by fans or galloping children. He feels that weightless, that inert.

Experimentally, he lifts both his legs off the floor. His body remains suspended in space, drifting idly downwards, offering gravity nothing to hold on to. He places his feet back on the tile and huffs. He tries to snap his fingers, but there is only smoke curling off the space his thumb and fingers share. 

He paces calmly towards the wall separating the kitchen from the hall. He considers it a moment, then in a few steps he leans and presses his body through. His clothes resist him, but the wall he passes through like nothing. He finds himself naked in the hall, freezing, with his clothes slumped in a pile back in the kitchen. 

There is nothing to do, so he redresses and goes to the living room to wait. 

 

 


	9. The Crossing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which words are exchanged across varying distances.

After days of hiding, John is waiting in the lounge, and Sherlock is pacing the length of his bedroom.

It’s time.

Sherlock attempts to map the looming conversation: John’s condition first, or his apology? ( _Apologia, n. Late Latin from the Greek: a speech in justification or defence - damnable words and their slippery meanings._ ) Surely John’s troubles come first. 

No, he thinks, that’s backwards; apology first. You have to offer John something to hold before you pry him open. ( _Once he saw video of an octopus stealing a diver’s camera, and the diver feeding his harpoon into that tangle of alien arms so they would release the camera, this careful boneless underwater exchange - so alien, those creatures, so curious, and rightly unsure which object is more useful - how to measure sentience in non-human models of cognition?)_ \- no, focus - apology first. Explanation, rather. 

Lead with logic. He doesn’t want to hear it but he will. A rational calculation of risk ( _but_ _it wasn’t_ ) with so many variables, so difficult to plan ( _damn the man and his honest face_ ) he will see that it made sense ( _it didn’t)_. It’s not so difficult, Sherlock tells himself, just tell him how he saved your life. But surely that expresses the wrong thing: more interest in soothing John’s anger than his predicament. If only it had been possible to tell him before it all happened - if only - but no. Without him in public mourning, Sherlock dies. Quite possibly they all do. But if only, if only, somewhere in the ticking-bomb hours before it all happened, the night before perhaps, when they sat silently in the lounge together, or riding in a cab, or in the morgue before it was all too late, perhaps he could have risked a sign, a clue, some signal John would only recognize months later… 

And what? Think himself insane, for one, or else come looking for him. No. If only. They were terrible choices for terrible times. If only he had seen it all sooner, if only he had decided sooner not to die, if only he had gotten ahead of it. If only he hadn’t run to Mycroft, he thinks, but only out of reflex; there’s no sharing blame. 

He can feel every clock in the flat ticking.

He thinks back to those last days before he left, so full of smothered horror and the dread of being right in one’s ugliest predictions. There was a better puzzle every day, and higher stakes, and more and more people he may never have seen again. And worse than anything, John so angry, so confused, so willing to help, even as things deteriorated. And then ( _oh no_ ) the boxes are disappearing from his room ( _not now, shit_ ) and then there is no ugly sediment, no pain in his side ( _but what…_ ), just a bone-deep dread, and his companion waiting for him in the lounge, tense and unknowing, as he is swept backwards into the past. He grips his hair and tries to catch hold of the world around him, but he has lost his context. He knows with dream logic that it’s the day before they will fight and he will go to meet Moriarty on the roof and he will fall. ( _No, that’s not right, it’s after all of that, it’s -_ ) Before his eyes and in his waking mind, it seems for all the world like the night before Moriarty will die and seem to win.

But he saw the boxes disappearing, he _saw them_ , and he is nagged by the uncanny sense that what he sees is wrong. He tries to focus, tries to unsee and resee what’s really there, but nothing changes. He puts both hands and forehead to the wall beside his bedroom door, rolls his head and looks left down the wall. His framed periodic table of elements is there twice: mounted on the wall, and sitting half-covered on the floor. They both flicker and he clenches his eyes shut. He reaches out, feeling for either piece. Dust, something says to him, there was dust. His hand collides with both frames at once, somehow, he can see it in his mind’s eye like double vision, and feel it twice in each of his singular finger tips. He feels the top of the frame; one has dust and the other doesn’t, so one is right and one is wrong, but he is touching them both at once, and so there’s no knowing which. With that realization, something in Sherlock rather breaks.

Because if there’s no trusting your senses, he thinks deliriously, and there’s no reason for your senses to be wrong, then there’s no way of sorting what’s real. It’s all real, then, or at least it’s all equally real or unreal. John’s body, Victor’s records, coming home to a bloody nightmare of indifference and fury, the slippage of time and space - all of it incomprehensible. If you can’t tell what’s real then you can’t know anything, so what is the sodding point? He might as well just do what he wants, and what he wants at the moment is very much to believe the evidence of his eyes, that it’s the night before he leaves, and to say what he wants to say, which is that he is about to ruin everything to save himself and he desperately needs John’s blessing before doing so. He wants to say it, to have said it, even though it was impossible. It still is, but sod it. He is sick to death of impossible things. 

In the living room, the curtains are drawn. Grey light shines in around their edges, illuminating dust motes at arcane angles on the furniture and floor. It could be any time of day, any day, but for the knot in his stomach that says this could be goodbye. ( _Eyes, look your last_.) (God no, the last thing he needs is Shakespeare.) 

John is standing in the middle of the room, most unnaturally. He does not lean, and his arms dangle straight at his sides. He looks up when Sherlock enters, and Sherlock relishes the storm of contradictory feelings on his face: shame and defiance, fight and flight, humiliation and righteous fury. That’s John all over, he thinks. ( _Sentimental._ ) That is so perfectly John.

John flexes his jaw and says, “What are we doing to do.”

Sherlock swallows. “I had a plan.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“I know,” he soothes. “But I need you to understand.”

John looks away, but he stays very still in the middle of the room. 

“It’s… you must know, by now, it’s Moriarty, the final problem. You must know. That I wouldn’t do this for nothing, I wouldn’t leave _all of this_ ,” he gestures around the room but he looks only at John. “For nothing.”

John breathes and reluctantly meets his eyes again, and his ridiculous straight posture straightens somehow. “Okay. Okay, so tell me.”

“The break-ins, the trial, Richard Brook: it was all a set-up for what comes next. I am discredited, and he and I meet on the roof of St. Bart’s, and he gives me the final problem: three snipers - one on Lestrade, one on Mrs. Hudson, and one on you. I die, or else all of you do. My choice. The bullets are only stopped if his people see me leap to my death.”

John blinks. “You… Jesus, okay. Okay. So that’s all set up before St. Bart’s?”

“Yes.”

John is quiet for a moment. His eyes are glassy and far away but he swallows down something big. “And so you… you know this is coming, when you go up there with him that day, and you…”

“I was hoping,” Sherlock begins carefully. “To avoid any casualties. As ever. To which end, the only course of action is to buy time and cover under which I might find and neutralize Moriarty’s people.”

“So you pretend to die.”

 “Yes. They leave off, I hunt them down, no one is shot. But for this plan to work, I would not be able to let on that I was alive until every fibre in his web had been dismantled.”

“Is that…,” John clears his throat. “What you’re saying is, _that_ \- dismantling the web, whatever - that turns out to be about a year and a half’s work.”

_Tell the truth._ “A lifetime.”

John’s chest is moving. “So the point of all this… you doing all this by yourself, you arsehole, you’re trying to tell me that you did this for us. For Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson and I.”

_Did?_ “No.”

“Because I resent being protected, you absolute bastard. That is not the way this works.”

“And you weren’t - _aren’t_ \- you…,” Sherlock scrubs a hand through his hair. “It’s not about protecting you lot - I wish it were, and everyone else seems to think... Honestly, I know I don’t have the most reliable moral compass, but I can count. Three deaths for one life is a poor exchange; the maths don’t change when that one life happens to be mine. Although it would be unfortunate, given my unique…” 

“Alright, yes, stop there. So you…,” his brow furrows and he breathes. “If pretending to be dead weren’t an option, you were actually going to jump. For real.” 

“Maths. Three versus one. All other courses indefensible,” he pauses. “Perhaps they still are. That is up to you.”

They stare mutely at each other for a moment. John is shaking his head. His eyes flicker over Sherlock’s face as his brain works.

“I wouldn’t undertake a thing like this lightly, you must understand. And I have been meticulously careful, knowing the risk to all involved. Still, I know it’s… not good.”

“God, what if something went wrong? You left us with no idea that we were in danger. We would have been been sitting ducks.”

“Yes, although if it were discovered that I was alive, you’d all have been shot long before you could prepare or I could intervene. None of which, I admit, would be any risk if I actually died. Do you see?” he shifts nervously. “I realize it’s no favour to you. But it’s a chance to save myself.”

Heat is radiating off of John. “You should have told me.”

“I was late to work it out, and late in deciding what to do.”

“Still. You still should have told me. I could have - ” 

“I’ve wanted to since the beginning. But you… God, I’m trying to be kind about this, I really am. No, don’t look like that… damn it, I knew I would cock this up,” he takes a breath. “You… are a good man.”

John pulls a face.

“And an honest man,” he continues, a bit forcefully in his desperation. “It’s why people like you, trust you. Come on, you must know this about yourself: you’re an open book, John, and not just to me. It’s perfectly fine most times, since I could practically read your mind anyway, and it’s useful many others, and it’s much of the reason you are welcome to be present for literally any moment of my life from the day we met until the day I die, _except_ for these seventeen months. These seventeen months - I’m sorry, I’m sorry - you have to be here, alone, without an explanation until long after.”

The light is changing. It could just be clouds, or it could be gathering dusk. Either way, Sherlock thinks, soon it will be night, and then it will be morning, and then he will go to meet his nemesis on top of a tall building and then he will appear to die. 

John is breathing hard. “I would have done anything.”

“Then do this,” Sherlock can hear himself begging. There is so little time left. “Do what I couldn’t: grieve me, publicly, be alone for this time, and survive. Take this risk, accept all of this to save my life, to give me a chance at coming _back_. Worst of all, agree to do it - to have done it - without knowing why.” He is babbling. He is going to be sick. “Believe that it was worthwhile, that this was something you would have agreed to if you’d had the choice at the start. All of your ridiculous fortitudes - your humanity, your reserve, your stupid bravery - I need them all, do you see? I know how big this is. This is a debt I can never repay. For my life, John, you went through all of this _for my life_ , I would never have asked it for anything less. Do this,” he implores. “Please.”

“Hey,” John reaches for him.

Sherlock’s hand catches with a slap around John’s wrist.

The underside of John’s arm in his palm is smooth and solid and warm and alive. They both watch in shock as Sherlock closes his fingers around John’s wrist, and John’s pulse thuds against the ball of his hand, matter on matter. John is staring at him wide-eyed, flexing his fingers in Sherlock’s grasp to feel the tendons straining against skin. 

“What - “

“I don’t know.”

Neither of them move. 

Sherlock, through the haze of his fear, knows that he’s grabbed onto the corner of something real. He squeezes John’s skin as the books change on the shelves and his old leather chair flickers and fades. He feels his eyes water. 

_Tell the truth_.

“John,” he begins miserably. “I thought you… there’s something very wrong with me. For days I’ve been seeing you just… I don’t know, dematerialize. I’m in my head somehow, I think, maybe it’s some sort of cumulative effect of being alone so long, but you can’t transubstantiate, it’s completely impossible, it’s…”

“No, I have been,” John interjects. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s real. Look, Sherlock, I know that on the best of days I have no bloody idea what’s going on in your head, and these have not been the best of days, okay, but I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen to either of us if we don’t sort this out.”

The world is becoming real around Sherlock, and he is looking a bit frantically around the room as piece by piece things cease to be _either this or that_ and become true. He staggers a bit as he looks around and they circle each other for a couple of awkward steps. He is overwhelmed, he is returning not leaving, he is home. It’s January and there are apologies to make. His chair is gone, and John’s sits lonely before the hearth. Almost to himself, he says, “I visited this place so many times, while I was away. In quiet moments, when I was alone and sure of my safety, I always came here - I suppose that’s why I wasn’t sure, at first - I sat in my chair, I came here and I talked to you.”

“In your head.”

Sherlock nods, staring at John’s chair and the empty place where his ought to be. 

John is watching him carefully. “What did we talk about?”

Sherlock shakes his head and laughs sadly, breathlessly. “Everything.”

 

***

 

John isn’t ready for this, not by a long shot, but Sherlock’s still got him by the wrist and heat is blooming in his face and all of it may vanish if he looks away this time, so he holds. “Hey, hey. Come back, eyes on me. Stay here, this is where the action is.”

Sherlock refocuses on him. “I’m sorry,” he looks at their hands. “Sorry.” He starts to release John’s hand, but John clutches his arm and holds him in place. Sherlock twists so they can clasp each other firmly by the wrist. They look each other in the eyes.

“I grieved you.”

“I know.”

“I was still gr…”

“I know. But whatever the… please believe me when I say that you fared far better than I would have.”

“You used me.”

“… Yes. I did. But not lightly. For my life.”

“You still used me.”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“I do understand that you may not forgive me. I hope you will. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

There’s a long pause. Sherlock’s fingers wrap all the ways around John’s forearm, touching thumb to tips. John presses his into Sherlock’s skin, feeling where they can’t quite close. 

“I am so fucking angry at you.”

“I know.”

Sherlock is staring at John, hurt and hopeful, and they are anchored together. They both fidget and settle.

“I… could go,” Sherlock begins. He looks breakable, suddenly, and very young. “You like solitude when you need to think. Mycroft’s alive. I wasn’t sure, but he came round while you were sleeping.”

John recoils. “What? How long ago?”

“I’m… not sure,” Sherlock pauses, either to think or stall - John can’t tell which. “Not long. In the last night or two.”

“And he knew all about this, I suppose.”

“He helped, yes. Immeasurably.”

“Cracking.”

They both wait.

“It’s your choice.”

“I don’t know,” John says quietly, and Sherlock’s face sinks. “But I also don’t know what happens if you leave at the moment,” he moves his thumb on Sherlock’s forearm. “We are a mess right now, both of us, so. You stay until we know how to get back to rights.”

“And after that?”

“After that we’ll see.”

Sherlock nods and John releases his arm. John still feels faint, but there is a warmth in his lungs. He flexes his toes against the floorboards. 

“I need some time.”

“Of course,” Sherlock backs away, head down. John recognizes an attempt to hide disappointment. “Thank you.”

On his way past the kitchen, Sherlock picks one of Mrs. Hudson’s muffins off their plate on the table. He tosses it over his shoulder without looking back. John, almost without moving, catches it. 

John thinks about the funeral, and the awful time at Harry’s, and the days full of nothing; the gossip mags that hounded and then forgot him, the hateful and supportive comments on his blog, the letters and the pity of his colleagues; the tears that came suddenly, the cane, the times he cleaned his gun just to hold it, and the scalding hot showers; the lovers who saw something and thought they saw it all; the unending solitude, the slow rebirth into something less than what he was; and he thinks about Sherlock, who is so unguarded right now, in his weary joy and his naked fear of what John will decide; and he asks himself, in this rare moment of honesty, if he had had the chance, if it were somehow possible, whether he would have agreed back then to go through all of this to give Sherlock a chance to save his own life; and something very soldierly inside him, a part of himself he has not heard from in a long time, replies, unequivocally, _yes_.

The muffin in his hand is bruised but it yields to his fingers. He should go upstairs, he thinks, get somewhere he can be alone with this for a while. Inside, the muffin is wet and spongy. His fingers pour through the air pockets, and he pictures his skin filling the space between molecules, flowing around atomic structures like well-contained water. He should go upstairs. He hears Sherlock open the cover on the record player in his bedroom. John waits for music, wondering if this is Sherlock’s attempt at an offer of privacy, but then he hears the player creak closed. Silence pervades in the flat. He should go. 

He needs time to think, it’s true. He will need time. He is drifting towards the kitchen. And inevitably, Sherlock will grow impatient when John’s anger doesn’t evaporate overnight. And John will storm out, he will slam doors, he will stay. John drops the muffin back onto the plate and continues to the hall. Sherlock won’t be able to hold off bragging about what he’s done, and John will take it badly, and they will quarrel, and each may or may not ever understand the enormity of what the other has endured. He passes the bathroom, dragging his fingers over the edge of the door frame; they hook, then pass through. He doesn’t know what to say next, or exactly what he wants. He finds, to his great surprise, that it is not an apology and it is not measured in blood. There are questions, thousands of questions, but no one place to start. He will need time. 

Sherlock’s door is ajar. There is no sound of movement inside. John does not picture Sherlock listening to his approach. He just puts his hand against and then into ripples of wooden grain and pushes the door open. 

Sherlock is standing over the record player with his back to the door. He is leaning forward on the dresser, with one hand bunched in his hair. He does not turn when he speaks.

“I thought you would have given all of this away. Or sold it. Some pieces would be useless to anyone else, but all my odd things scattered about the flat, most are antiques or rarities of one kind or another. They’re worth an immense amount of money. Mycroft would have bought the essentials back from you under a false name if you ever took them to market, which I hoped you would. I told him they were yours. I didn’t mean for him to leave you buried in rubbish.

“Still, I’m happy to have them.”

John hovers in the doorway, watching Sherlock across the room. The back of Sherlock Holmes in pyjamas: such a common sight, once. And maybe, now, again. He wonders if Sherlock can feel him staring, but he doesn’t move. When Sherlock turns, he does not waver as he hears over and over _my friend_ , _my friend_ , _my friend_.

John knows what he wants to say, what he feels for the first time. Whatever else, he is happy that Sherlock is alive.

He quirks a small smile. Sherlock smiles cautiously back.

John has no words. _Well, out with it_. He lifts his hands and wiggles his fingers. Sherlock watches him uncertainly. He approaches Sherlock’s armchair, huddled in the corner. He places his hand gently on top, and then with a little pressure, he pushes inside up to his palm. 

Sherlock’s gaze is riveted to the impossible immersion of matter in matter. He crosses the room in a stupor, terrified and fascinated and looking utterly himself. John curls his hand in to the wrist and turns his palm up. He pokes his fingers back out the top of the leather, startling an incredulous laugh out of Sherlock. John watches him stare, this surreal man, feeling a little drunk and a lot warm and quiet and happy.

Sherlock reaches out and touches his fingertips to John’s where they are protruding out of the padding. They meet solidly, skin on skin. Sherlock’s brow furrows and he glances at John. John shrugs and shakes his head. Sherlock pushes the sleeve of John’s long tshirt up to his forearm where it holds. He slides his hand slowly back down to John’s wrist, which is is warm where it plunges into the cool leather. He pulls John out of the padding and turns his freed palm over in his hands. He smiles in awe. There it is: Sherlock Holmes, stumped. 

They meet eyes for a moment and share a nervous giggle. It’s unbelievable, it really is, just all of it.

Sherlock runs two long fingers up the length of John’s palm, then puts his hands on the outside of John’s arms and squeezes, testing his solidity. His eyes are roving. He presses his fingertips to John’s chest, grinning a bit broader, and then puts both hands on the tops of John’s shoulders, then to the sides of his neck. They lock eyes and the grin slowly fades. Sherlock shifts his thumb lightly over John’s skin, and John knows he is reaching for a pulse. He swallows and holds his gaze.

Sherlock closes his eyes, and a tiny, dreamy smile crosses his face. 

_Everything_ , he said.

John leans forward and kisses him. He responds so slowly that for a moment John worries he is lost to his head again, to wherever he goes, but then Sherlock exhales against his cheek and there’s a hand at his nape and everything tilts so beautifully into motion, into being, and in the back of John’s blank, blank mind there are lifetimes being reborn, dreamed decades long forgotten that are worth hoping for again; there is a rest of his life, there is adventure and quiet, there is certainty. There are all these things that have been living in his body, dormant these two years. Sherlock opens his mouth a little wider, and John understands somehow that this will be the last first kiss he ever has. Or if it isn’t, if this isn’t what he thinks it is, if he still can’t quite read Sherlock’s mind back, there will be other first kisses, sure. But none of them will ever again contain the same hopeful question he has been asking all his life - _is it you?_ \- because he is receiving his answer now: _it is_. He puts his arms around Sherlock’s ribs, minding the wound, and leans in. 

That small encouragement is all it takes, and Sherlock is crowding him slowly backwards into the wall. John’s head spins - walls don’t stop him anymore - but he holds on. Sherlock puts one hand on the back of his crown and the other around his waist as they hit the surface, and John feels his shoulders and hips shift through his clothes and into the drywall, but his head and the small of his back are anchored to safety, here in this room, by Sherlock’s unchanging skin, against which he is solid and whole. He grabs Sherlock by the shoulders and looks up at him, steadying himself. 

Sherlock is looking him over under hooded eyes. He pauses and exhales. He looks sad and satisfied, somehow. 

He says, “I’m like this too.”

“No you’re not,” John says, though he’s not sure what he means.

“Yes. I am,” he replies, and he kisses John again against the wall.

Sherlock dips at the knees and presses in, bringing their bodies flush from mouth to hips. John lifts his eyebrows at the unexpected bulk against his pelvic bone, but then he thinks, _makes sense_ , and arches his hips forwards. 

Sherlock breaks the kiss and leans his forehead against the wall above John’s shoulder, catching his breath and letting the hand on John’s back slide down to his hips. John rubs his hands over Sherlock’s back in a way he hopes is soothing.

He mumbles into the side of Sherlock’s face, “Where have you been?”

Sherlock shakes his head and tucks his chin into John’s shoulder. John snakes a hand into his hair and moves his curls gently across the back of his head. Sherlock vocalizes into John’s shirt and rolls into the touch, and then he ducks and kisses John, open-mouthed through thin cotton, exactly on the surface of the scar that he has never seen. John feels heavy. He thinks he understands. 

And then the plaster through his submerged shoulders is solidifying, is slowing his blood where it flows and his muscles where they flex and pull away, and it is closing up around him, or maybe he is closing up around it, and before he can consider the significance he puts his hands flat against the wall and pushes them both off. 

And then they are kissing again, and Sherlock’s hands are up under his shirt, and John will stop them from teetering onto the bed because he is not ready yet, and he will keep them there longer than he really wants to, because he cannot, not until Sherlock’s careful gestures have turned into artless sixth-former groping, not until he has swallowed enough of Sherlock’s need that this own is not frightening; and then he will let Sherlock undress them, and they will be lost to slow kissing and the heat of skin on skin.

And despite John’s precautions, he will find himself cursing into Sherlock’s hair, his shoulder, the long of his belly, knowing he is done for; and for a moment, he will see white, and his hands will begin to sink through Sherlock’s skin, his chest easing into the insides of Sherlock’s white thighs, and Sherlock will pull him up, and he will look terrified and calm and his hands will be gentle on John’s wrists, and he will say _no, no, remember_ , and they will kiss until he does. 

And Sherlock will come quickly, with a first-timer’s sensitivity, and by the time he comes down John will be tender and a little soft. When Sherlock reaches for him, he will say _no, stay here_ and intertwine their fingers _._ Sherlock will want to know why, but there’s no good answer John can give him, so instead they will kiss until both of their heads are sleepy on the pillow even though it’s mid-day outside the limits of this dim, dusty room, in which it could be any time of any day from now through the end of their lives.

When they wake up, they will try to put themselves back together.

 


	10. Waking Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is work and rest.

John wakes up shivering. It’s dark in the flat and he is still naked. The covers lie flat around him and he is sunk a few inches into an unfamiliar mattress. He is backsliding. _No, no_ , he thinks, and he looks at Sherlock, who is sleeping. He struggles against the give of the mattress until he can settle himself back on its surface again. It’s a bit better if he’s on his back, so his weight is more diffused. He knows there is no point bothering with the blankets. He wants to get up, put his clothes on, and be whole again, but that’s not what will happen. He’s not sure he meant to say all the things he said today. He’s not sure what will happen if he gets out of this bed. 

Sherlock begins to stir, either from the foreign feeling of another body shifting in his bed (has Sherlock ever shared a bed before?) or from being stared at, John does not care which. He snuffles and stretches and opens an eye to his right and he says to John, “What are you doing?”

He does not wait for a reply before lifting up the blankets, which pass through John in a wave, and beckoning him in. John shakes his head, and Sherlock looks at him and hums, and he seems so unafraid, perhaps he is only half there and half lost somewhere in his mind; but he stretches an arm across the bed and hikes up one knee, and maybe where Sherlock is it’s far in their future and all of this is normal, this is all mundane, and he knows what to do; so John swallows and settles in with the back of his head up on Sherlock’s shoulder and his knees over Sherlock’s offered thigh. Sherlock closes his other leg on top of John’s and settles an arm on his chest while he lets the blankets down on top of them. Against Sherlock’s solid mass, they hold. 

John isn’t sure what’s going to happen, but it’s warm where they are sealed together, and he is still so very tired. 

 

***

 

Sherlock wakes up wrapped around John, with short blonde hair in his nose and an unfathomable hope in his heart. His head feels fuzzy but not dislocated. It’s night, it’s his bedroom, they have been asleep a while. John kissed him, John told him the truth, John stayed.

The clock on his nightstand says 7:14pm. The best part of the day is just beginning. In his sleep, he has been wandering through molecular structures, big as houses, changeable as weather, searching for answers. He hopes, he dares to hope. He hasn’t found them yet. _When John wakes up_ , he tells himself, _I will interrogate him._ He thinks they will talk until he has figured it out, why it all happened, why it’s getting better, why it isn’t fully fixed yet. He will ask John to recite every detail of every moment from when he first found out Sherlock was alive, and some things before that besides, like why he left Baker Street for all those months, and what he ate every day while Sherlock was gone, and when he began using the cane and then stopped, and how it had felt to live a normal life again, and the name of every new person who had been inside their flat, and how often he thought of him, and what he said those times he visited Sherlock’s grave, what they talked about, whether it was everything too. He will ask John how long it has been everything, whether he can unpack, whether John will begin sleeping downstairs, why he never did earlier.

His mind is racing, he is seeing the past, the future, he is everywhere. 

“Hey,” John says. He is somewhere outside of Sherlock’s body. Of course he is, what a rubbish thing to think, he thinks. John puts a hand to the base of his head and squeezes. Sherlock leans into it and follows the touch back into his body. When he opens his eyes, John is watching him.

John asks, quietly, “What do you need?”

Weeks, he thinks, maybe months. He needs years, actually, the space of centuries to come and go and give him time to grow into this. He needs a steadying hand, and conversation; he needs to explain, and he needs someone to walk beside him, someone sturdy and good and better than he deserves. He needs to make that happen. He needs to know that it will always be just around the corner, just an arm’s reach away. 

So he says, “I need you to eat something. It’s been nearly two days. You’re well into ketosis.” He pictures glucose and ketone and cannibalized tissue.

John smiles grimly. “Yeah. And believe me, that’s top of the docket. But it’s also not really an answer.”

Sherlock sighs. He hates it when his few moments of kindness go to waste.

“What do you need?”

He is not sure he can say it, so he kisses John’s jaw, his collarbone, the flat expanse of his chest.  “Only time.”

“Right,” John thinks on it a moment. “Right. I think I can give you that. I said I would. But you need to understand, we are still very far from alright.”

Sherlock nods. He is fitting his thumbs along the inside of John’s hipbones and listening to his lungs working. Bodies are so different when alive.

“You’ve been a bit better, though, haven’t you? These last few hours.”

“I wasn’t better when we started in the lounge,” he runs two fingers up the trail of hair on John’s belly. “I wasn’t entirely better just now.”

“When we started in the lounge I was walking through walls. I couldn’t pick up the toast you left me. I still don’t totally understand it, but it’s something to do with you, and something to do with… I don’t know, hiding, I suppose.”

“These last few hours I’ve been more… anchored.”

“Is it better when we’re talking?”

Sherlock hesitates. “Yes.”

“Is it better whenever you aren’t just sitting alone?”

He thinks. “It wasn’t at first. I don’t remember coming home from the hospital or my first conversations with any of you - not you, or Mrs. Hudson, or Lestrade if we had one. But the last few days, yes.”

John pushes Sherlock’s hair out of his face and looks down at him. He turns his face the other way, but John follows him. “You were alone most of this time, weren’t you.”

Sherlock does not know if he means the last few days or while he was away. “Yes.”

“Okay,” he takes a breath. “Okay. I think we need to keep you around people for a while, while you level out.”

He must look horrified, because John’s belly has tightened and he is nearly laughing.

“I meant, you know, us in 221. Keep it in the family for a bit. And I’ll have Greg round again, in another day or two, since apparently he’s made it in.”

“No,” he mumbles into John’s stomach.

“Sorry, if he’s good enough to be threatened by your nemeses, he’s good enough to have over for tea.”

“No,” he imagines himself, after all of this long beautiful quiet, without a moment’s peace for weeks. He would rather leave. “No bloody playdates. The last thing I need is… I just need things to be back as they were.”

“No chance of that, mate, sorry. Never was.”

He inhales hard through his nose. He needs solitude. He will always need it. He tenses against the hell of a life under the scrutiny of others. “I know that. I just… just give me time, and stop avoiding me. It will be fixed.”

John is quiet. He pushes his hand deeper into Sherlock’s hair and watches him. “Will it stay fixed?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Why not?”

“Yes, it will stay fixed.” 

“Are you lying?”

“Of course I’m lying.”

“Why?”

“Because the truth will put you in a difficult position, and you won’t know how to feel about it, and for reasons I will never understand you will try to keep me from catching on - which will fail, by the way - and send yourself into a panic and make everything worse.”

John goes very still. “You think it will stay fixed as long as I stay.”

“As long as I have regular companionship, more accurately, for which role you happen to be the only person I could ever accept. And, I think, the only one who could survive me.”

“So, what, forever? For the rest of your life? I can’t promise that.”

“I know.”

“No one can.”

“I know.”

They say nothing for many minutes. Sherlock’s head floats on John’s stomach as he breathes. 

Some unknowable amount of time later, John says, “Okay.”

“What?”

“Okay. Okay, yes. I think so.”

“You said you can’t - “

“I know. And we’ll, we’ll see, in the end. But yeah, I think so.”

He takes John’s hand from his hair and the other from his back and locks their fingers together, then spreads their arms wide as they will reach and presses John down into the mattress. The sheets bend and the surface dips under their weight, but it holds. He pushes himself up and they kiss slowly while Sherlock ignores the fact that he is subtly grinding himself into John’s hip. When John’s hips begin to move and there’s an answering hardness against his stomach, he reaches for him with an inquiring look.

“Yeah, go on, you’ll want to butter me up before I’m through feeling happy you’re alive. We’ve some very large rows in our future.”

“Yes, so I imagine.”

“You should start thinking up synonyms for ‘apologize,’ by the way.”

“You forget, I’ve had months to prepare.”

“Yeah, the less said about that the better, actually. For the moment.”

“My atonement, remorse, and reparations.”

“I’d just as soon start with dinner, actually. ‘Starving’ is too mild.”

Sherlock pauses, drawing his hands up John’s ribs. “Quite right.” 

He stands with a flourish, drawing the whole of the blankets around himself. John curses in the cold air and fishes for his clothes off the side of the bed. 

“I regret, lament, and am loathe to tell you that I will be needing these. Get a fire on.”   
  


 ---  
  


Despite the cocoon of blankets, it’s freezing in the kitchen. Sherlock tucks the ends of the sheet between his feet and the tile. He puts down four slices of toast and dials for Thai. He orders mango salad, fresh rolls, tom yum soup, and a carton of varying juices for tonight, and four dishes of noodles, meat, and veg for the fridge. John stumbles out of the bedroom before the toast pops, redressed in his pyjamas. He rubs his arms for warmth and calls Sherlock a wanker, then he crouches down at the fireplace. Sherlock leans on the counter and watches him maneuver the wood, stuff it with crumpled newsprint, and retrieve a long match from the mantle. He hesitates a moment and adjusts one of the photos; an old one, of himself with his mates from the Fifth Northumberland. Then he ducks down again and lights the fire, and looks happily at the used-up match that he turns over and over in his hands. 

Sherlock dresses the toasts alternately with butter, jam, and honey, and stacks them on a clean piece of ceramic sitting on the oven. He puts it in front of John on the floor of the lounge and sits cross-legged across from him. 

John scoffs. “We do have plates.”

“This is a plate.” He picks up the piece with butter.

“It’s a pot rest.”

“‘Plates’ are designated by usage. Anything’s a plate when it has food on.”

John is coaxing the fledging fire with a poker. “They’re in the left cupboard now.”

“I didn’t look.”

The cross log catches, and John sits back with a satisfied hum. He takes a piece with jam and takes half into his mouth, cupping his hand underneath to catch crumbs.

“A little lean for a recovery meal, though, isn’t it?”

“Thai is on the way, but it will be forty minutes. Eat.”

“Cor, it’s freezing.”

Sherlock opens one side of the blankets and raises his eyebrows. John laughs around a full mouth. _Won’t be the last time_ , he thinks.

“Stop it, whatever you’re smirking about, and get me some socks.”

In lieu of socks, Sherlock stokes the fire. With a little prodding, it redoubles in size. The light from the kitchen is still on, but their shadows are long across the floor of the dark lounge. He glances over his shoulder. Above the couch, their profiles float in living silhouette. He pictures them burned there, like ashes on a cave wall, their figures posed forever in close conversation. 

“We can’t hide out forever, you know,” John says after a spell. “There’s a whole crowd still camped outside.”

“Is there? There wasn’t when I met Mycroft.”

“Go look.”

When he parts the curtains, camera flashes glitter here and there along the street. He lets them fall closed.

“I take that as a yes.”

He retakes his spot on the floor. “Yes.” 

“He must have had them cleared out before he came. Even without them, there’s a whole public out there, to say nothing of the police, who will be wanting a word. As far as I know you’re still wanted for murder, resisting arrest…,” he pauses. “I’ve never been sure why I’m not in jail, actually. I did assault the Chief Superintendant. I suppose that was your doing, too.”

“Mycroft.”

“Oh, terrific.”

“Yes, enjoy that. He really is the worst bastard to owe a favour.”

“Useful, though.”

“From time to time.”

John regards him curiously. “So you two are… I mean, you seem to be…”

“The Yard won’t be a problem. We’ve been amassing evidence for two years. There’s more than enough to clear my name. Moreover, given the international cleanup I’ve performed, Mycroft’s people are prepared to sacrifice one of his subordinates to testify on my behalf. A bundle has been prepared for disclosure; it will be given to Interpol as well.”

“A subordinate? Will that do it?”

“Mycroft thinks so. Apparently she is looking for an excuse to go legitimate anyway. Smart girl. Who could stand it? She’ll be relocated afterwards.”

“She’s leaving? And no one is worried about that?”

“It’s well in hand. She has a lover in New Jersey, so the benefit is mutual.”

“Right. Okay, but the public will be much more difficult.”

“What public?”

“The public public, Sherlock, the… the people outside, the people we see at Tesco and on the tube. The people who bring you cases, if you’re doing cases again. The public doesn’t defer to the justice system, not about things like this. It won’t help if you’re seen wandering off into your head.” 

He frowns. “They will have to accept the evidence.”

“It’s not so simple.”

Sherlock looks at their profiles on the wall.

“I’m serious. That’s not how a public relations battle is won, as you of all people ought to know.”

“The evidence is all I have.”

“Maybe. Depends on how well you can behave yourself, doesn’t it. This is going to be messy, and you need to keep your head.”

The fire is warm on the side of Sherlock’s face. “The timing is less than ideal.”

John hums. “Anyway, a little bit of infamy rather suits you.”

Sherlock huffs. He can feel John watching him. He can hear John grinning, just the slightest bit.

“To be honest, Sherlock, it’s all a bit unbelievable, evidence or not. I’m not sure I’d buy it either, if I were some poor bloke who’d never met you. The whole Richard Brook thing, it’s… it’s the simpler explanation, really. It’s hard enough to believe there’s one bloody genius who’s cracked enough to pull all of this off, let alone two.”

There is something very heavy and very warm settling in Sherlock’s chest. He holds for a moment, thinking about all that will happen. In a minute, he thinks, he will kiss John again, and undress him, and John will be flushed pink from tips to toes. He pushes the plate aside. Twenty five minutes until Thai. “It’s been so long since I’ve been appropriately praised.”

John snorts. “I don’t know, we didn’t sleep for that long.”

“Oh, clever,” Sherlock says into his mouth, crowding him backwards down to the floor. “I suspect you’ve never been praised properly at all.”

“That’s a bit bold.”

“Only right.” 

 

***

 

There’s much to be done.

For the next few weeks, John is mercurial. As the shine fades from their reunion, and as more details from Sherlock’s time away come to light, he wavers unpredictably between relief, sadness, and rage. He cannot stop himself from asking questions he does not want the answers to, and so long as he is solid and whole, Sherlock doesn’t lie. He will digest the story slowly, in little pieces picked off from the whole. 

The night after they speak with NSY, Sherlock sleeps in Mrs. Hudson’s flat. 

Still, it’s an improvement, and though Sherlock is still alternately skittish and moony, John keeps him anchored with a constant trickle of talk and touch and instruction. When he is able, he tugs gently at Sherlock’s stories, easing him into longer digressions while he is grounded by John’s attention. Sherlock slowly relearns his own language, and the walls of the mind palace reform. (There, beside the door to the garden, he places two framed periodic tables: one hung on the wall, and one forever dusty on the floor, for remembrance.) He is right, in the end: it takes time.

There are still traces of John’s transubstantiation all around the flat, but a month after the last transgression they remember it like a fever dream, loose in logic and easily forgotten had it not been so strange and so vivid. It does not make sense, not with Sherlock’s vast knowledge of all things real and factual, not with any part of his sense of the world, and so after a time he puts it out of mind with some relief. But the knowledge of it lives in John’s body, like his limp and his flashbacks, those tokens of other years that were both lost and well spent. John is a crack shot and a genius of suture, after all; he has more muscle memory than most. 

He knows that there will be times, again, when he will begin to lift off the skin of the world, because John’s body can change but his nature does not; and Sherlock watches, though he pretends he doesn’t think of it, and often enough he is able to intervene. Sometimes, though - like when Harry dies - there is nothing to be done, and he can only hold John as he ever has, as tenuously as water in the palm, and stay with him until it passes. 

John thinks about his lost years often, in those first few weeks, and later, when things have died down and the hard work of life begins. In those moments, he always reaches for Sherlock, whose body carries its own trap doors, and who understands.

Even after many years, they never quite numb to the pleasure and the danger of meeting each other in a single space and time. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who stayed with me through this strange little story. Your comments and warmth have meant the world to me. One final thanks as well to mangledyarn for her very sharp eye and good counsel.
> 
> And NOW I'm ready for series 3.


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